Response surface techniques developed for probabilistic analysis of accident consequences

Response surface techniques have been developed for obtaining probability distributions of the consequences of postulated nuclear reactor accidents. The probabilistic response surface methodology reported includes new knot-point selection schemes and response surface functions, functional transformations of both parameters and consequence variables, smooth synthesis of regionwise response surfaces and the treatment of random conditions for conditional distributions. The computer code PROSA developed for implementing these techniques is independent of the deterministic accident analysis codes. It can also be used for direct simulation of general analytical functions. The significance, accuracy and other merits of these features are discussed and typical results are presented for illustration purposes.