Abstract
Commercial used nuclear fuel (UNF) in the United States is expected to remain in storage for periods potentially greater than 40 years. Extended storage (ES) time and irradiation to high-burnup values (>45 GWd/t) may increase the potential for fuel failure during normal and accident conditions involving storage and transportation. Fuel failure, depending on the severity, could result in changes to the geometric configuration of the fuel, which has safety and regulatory implications. The likelihood and extent of fuel reconfiguration and its impact on the safety of the UNF is not well understood. The objective of this work is to assess and quantify the impact of fuel reconfiguration due to fuel failure on criticality safety of UNF in storage and transportation casks. Criticality analyses are conducted considering representative UNF designs covering a range of enrichments and burnups in multiple cask systems.
Prior work developed a set of failed fuel configuration categories and specific configurations were evaluated to understand trends and quantify the consequences of worst-case potential reconfiguration progressions. These results will be summarized here and indicate that the potential impacts on subcriticality can be rather significant for certain configurations (e.g., >20% Δkeff). It can be concluded that the consequences of credible fuel failure configurations from ES or transportation following ES are manageable (e.g., <5% Δkeff).
The current work expands on these efforts and examines some modified scenarios and modified approaches to investigate the effectiveness of some techniques for reducing the calculated increase in keff. The areas included here are more realistic modeling of some assembly types and the effect of reconfiguration of some assemblies in the storage and transportation canister.
