The BEMUSE [1] (Best Estimate Methods –
Uncertainty and Sensitivity Evaluation) Programme has
been promoted by the Working Group on Accident
Management and Analysis (GAMA) and endorsed by the
Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI).
The high-level objectives of the work are:
• to evaluate the practicability, the quality and the
reliability of Best-Estimate (BE) methods including
uncertainty evaluation in applications relevant to
nuclear reactor safety;
• to promote the use of BE-Methods by the regulatory
bodies and the industry.
Operational objectives include an assessment of the
applicability of best-estimate and uncertainty methods to
integral tests and their use in reactor applications.
The scope of the Programme is to perform Large
Break Loss-Of-Coolant Accident (LBLOCA) analyses
making reference to experimental data and to a Nuclear
Power Plant (NPP) in order to address the issue of “the
capabilities of computational tools” including
scaling/uncertainty analysis.
The justification for such an activity comes from the
consideration that a wide spectrum of uncertainty
methods applied to BE codes exist and are used in
research laboratories, but their practicability and/or
validity is not sufficiently established to support general
use of the codes and acceptance by industry and safety
authorities. The consideration of the BE codes and
uncertainty evaluation for Design Basis Accident (DBA),
by itself, shows the safety significance of the proposed
activity.
End users for the results are expected to be the
industry, the safety authorities and the research
laboratories.
Participants coming from more than 10 organizations
will take part in the Programme