Preliminary studies of used fuel generated in the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative have indicated that current used fuel transport casks may be insufficient for the transportation of said fuel. This work considers transport of three 5-year-cooled oxide advanced burner reactor used fuel assemblies with a burn-up of 160 MWD kg. A transport cask designed to carry these asse...

Three large open pool fire experiments involving a calorimeter the size of a spent fuel rail cask were conducted at Sandia National Laboratories’ Lurance Canyon Burn Site. These experiments were performed to study the heat transfer between a very large fire and a large cask-like object. In all of the tests, the calorimeter was located above the center of a 7.93m diameter fuel pan, elevated 1m a...

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not currently require full-scale physical testing of shipping casks as part of its certification process. Stakeholders have long urged NRC to require full-scale testing as part of certification. NRC is currently preparing a full-scale casktesting proposal as part of the Package Performance Study (PPS) that grew out of the NRC reexamination of th...

There are 103 commercial nuclear power stations currently operating in the United States, generating a total of about 2 000 t of spent fuel each year. Over 40 000 t of spent fuel have accumulated since these plants began operation, with the fuel being stored first in at-reactor spent fuel storage pools and later in independent spent fuel storage installations and dry cask storage facilities. Th...