ESTIMATE OF THE ERROR IN MONITORING THE ENERGY RELEASE DISTRIBUTION ON THE BASIS OF A CONDITIONAL PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION DENSITY

It is shown by means of calculations and experiments that the generally accepted practice of using an unconditional instead of a conditional probability density distribution when estimating the error in monitoring the power in the fuel channels with the highest power density in the cores of a wide class of reactors with standard power monitoring error greater than 1.5% results in a systematic underestimation of the margin up to the limits for safe operation by up to approximately 5 and 10% for regimes with and without real-time optimization of the energy release distributions, respectively. This underestimation decreases to zero monotonically when the average power is used instead of the maximum power.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]