Comparison of Contain and TCE calculations for direct containment heating of Surry Original Research Article

This paper presents the results of several CONTAIN code calculations used to model direct containment heating (DCH) loads for the Surry plant. The results of these calculations are compared with the results obtained using the two-cell equilibrium (TCE) model for the same set of initial and boundary conditions. This comparison is important because both models have been favorably validated against the available DCH database, yet there are potentially important modeling differences. The comparisons are to quantitatively assess the impact of these differences. A major conclusion of this study is that, for the accident conditions studied and for a broad range of sensitivity cases, the peak pressures predicted by both TCE and Contain are well below the failure pressure for the Surry containment.