Talk:CRAC-II

Pending details
I have written to Sandia National Laboratories for details of the CRAC report. Specifically, the results quoted in the article are from a "class-9 accident". I have requested details as to what makes an accident "class-9". Simesa 15:35, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Today I again e-mailed and snail-mailed for more information on CRAC-II and NUREG-1150 from John German of Sandia National Laboratories. Simesa 00:18, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

NRC disclaimer to CRAC-II and NUREG-1150
I just received the following e-mail from the person who signed at the bottom (I will e-mail back to verify that NRC sent this):

"Hello;"

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requests you include the following paragraph, attributed to the NRC, in your Wikipedia entries on CRAC-II and NUREG-1150:

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has devoted considerable research resources, both in the past and currently, to evaluating accidents and the possible public consequences of severe reactor accidents. The NRC's most recent studies have confirmed that early research into the topic led to extremely conservative consequence analyses that generate invalid results for attempting to quantify the possible effects of very unlikely severe accidents. In particular, these previous studies did not reflect current plant design, operation, accident management strategies or security enhancements. They often used unnecessarily conservative estimates or assumptions concerning possible damage to the reactor core, the possible radioactive contamination that could be released, and possible failures of the reactor vessel and containment buildings. These previous studies also failed to realistically model the effect of emergency preparedness. The NRC staff is currently pursuing a new, state-of-the-art assessment of possible severe accidents and their consequences.

"Please feel free to e-mail me to discuss this."

Scott Burnell ( srb3@nrc.gov ), Public Affairs Officer, Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Let's discuss this in the NUREG-1150 Discussion. Simesa 08:42, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

why does this article have a software stub tag
I assume some software was involved in the study? But as its not mentioned beyond the word calculations ..... Dalf | Talk 09:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * While I didn't place the tag, I initially wrote the article to describe CRAC-II as referring to both the computer code used in the catastrophe model, and the results of running the code, as well as general conclusions. Apparently (and obviously), such studies are conducted using computer models, which get named. In this field, it appears that references are made to the code base as predicting this, or assuming that, and the study gets associated with the code used to create the data. In a sense, it's a way of decoupling the results from the researchers who contributed to aspects of the model. I suspect in the end, no one person is responsible for the conclusion, its a joint project, in which various aspects of a nuclear event are modeled by working groups, and then the whole simulation is run at the conclusion. So CRAC-II presumably refers to a particular collection of inter-compatible codes which aim to model the Industry. There is evidence that the same codes were run using the US plants as input data, and separately using European plants. What these studies have in common is the software - the conclusions are unique to the input data. Benjamin Gatti 19:33, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm fairly positive CRAC-II refers to the computer code and not the study. The studies name is the 1982 Sandia Siting Study, also known as NUREG CR 2239.  Ajnosek 13:59, 5 October 2007 (UTC)