Uranium dioxide fuel pellets crack during the irradiation of light water reactor fuel rods, enhancing fuel/cladding mechanical interactions and creating asymmetric fuel rod internal geometries that result in nonlinear mechanical behavior. A formulation analogous to a constitutive equation is developed to describe the nonlinear load-displacement behavior of cracked fuel. Cladding elastic ridge heights are computed via a simple shell analysis during the iterative solution of the cracked-fuel constitutive equation. Results indicate that maximum cladding ridge heights do not necessarily occur at the smallest initial fuel/cladding gap size, and that the mode of cladding deformation depends on gap size and rod power. The method can be extended to more detailed cladding deformation analyses, and is useful for estimating the cladding stresses needed for fuel rod failure analyses.