Practices and Developments in Spent Fuel Burnup Credit Applications

Practices and Developments in Spent Fuel Burnup Credit Applications
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Documents the proceedings of the IAEA's third major BUC meeting in Madrid in April 2002 on requirements, practices and developments in BUC applications. Fifty-four participants from 18 countries addressed validation of codes and methods, key issues, safety assessment and implementation, and future applications.

Guidebook on Spent Fuel Storage Options and Systems

Guidebook on Spent Fuel Storage Options and Systems
Author: IAEA
Publisher: International Atomic Energy Agency
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9201357230

This publication is a new edition of Technical Reports Series No. 240, Guidebook on Spent Fuel Storage (1991). It aims to provide guidance on spent fuel storage options, describing the history and observed trends of spent fuel storage technologies, gathering operational experiences and lessons learned. The evolving aspects related to higher burnup and mixed oxide (MOX) spent fuel, and the extension of storage timeframes are detailed. It also includes information on the distribution of the current global inventory of spent fuel by storage systems, a description of (and terminology relating to) available spent fuel storage technologies and different storage facility locations.

Investigation of Burnup Credit Issues in BWR Fuel

Investigation of Burnup Credit Issues in BWR Fuel
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 10
Release: 1999
Genre:
ISBN:

Calculations for long-term-disposal criticality safety of spent nuclear fuel requires the application of burnup credit because of the large mass of fissile material that will be present in the repository. Burnup credit calculations are based on depletion calculations that provide a conservative estimate of spent fuel contents, followed by criticality calculations to assess the value of keff for a spent fuel cask or a fuel configuration under a variety of probabilistically derived events. In order to ensure that the depletion calculation is conservative, it is necessary to both qualify and quantify assumptions that can be made in depletion models used to characterize spent fuel. Most effort in the United States this decade has focused on burnup issues related to pressurized-water reactors. However, requirements for the permanent disposal of fuel from boiling-water reactors has necessitated development of methods for prediction of spent fuel contents for such fuels. Concomitant with such analyses, validation is also necessary. This paper provides a summary of initial efforts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to better understand and validate spent fuel analyses for boiling-water-reactor fuel.

Practices for Interim Storage of Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel

Practices for Interim Storage of Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel
Author: IAEA
Publisher: International Atomic Energy Agency
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2022-09-28
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9201233221

This publication provides an introduction to the management of research reactor spent nuclear fuel (RRSNF). Five key areas are discussed: types of RRSNF, characterization data, wet storage considerations, dry storage considerations, and lessons learned and current practices. Information on internationally accepted standards as well as information on aspects such as drying treatment and surveillance programmes are presented, as well as suggestions for further optimization of effective and safe storage of RRSNF through the application of new approaches. The intended users of this publication include industry professionals at operating research reactors and at RRSNF storage facilities who need to identify the most suitable approach for interim storage of spent fuel.

Reactor Critical Benchmark Calculations for Burnup Credit Applications

Reactor Critical Benchmark Calculations for Burnup Credit Applications
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 8
Release: 1990
Genre:
ISBN:

In the criticality safety analyses for the development and certification of spent fuel casks, the current approach requires the assumption of fresh fuel'' isotopics. It has been shown that the removal of the fresh fuel'' assumption and the use of spent fuel isotopics (burnup credit'') greatly increases the payload of spent fuel casks by reducing the reactivity of the fuel. Regulatory approval of burnup credit and the requirements of ANSI/ANS 8.1 specify that calculational methods for away-from-reactor criticality safety analyses be validated against experimental measurements. Criticality analyses for low-enriched lattices of fuel pins using the fresh fuel isotopics'' assumption have been widely benchmarked against applicable critical experiments. However, the same computational methods have not been benchmarked against criticals containing spent fuel because of the non-existence of spent fuel critical experiments. Commercial reactors offer an excellent and inexhaustible source of critical configurations against which criticality analyses can be benchmarked for spent fuel configurations. This document provides brief descriptions of the benchmarks and the computational methods for the criticality analyses. 8 refs., 1 fig., 1 tab.

An International Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility

An International Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility
Author: Russian Academy of Sciences
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2005-10-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309181186

As part of a long-standing collaboration on nuclear nonproliferation, the National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences held a joint workshop in Moscow in 2003 on the scientific aspects of an international radioactive disposal site in Russia. The passage of Russian laws permitting the importation and storage of high-level radioactive material (primarily spent nuclear fuel from reactors) has engendered interest from a number of foreign governments, including the U.S., in exploring the possibility of transferring material to Russia on a temporary or permanent basis. The workshop focused on the environmental aspects of the general location and characteristics of a possible storage site, transportation to and within the site, containers for transportation and storage, inventory and accountability, audits and inspections, and handling technologies.

Modelling of Fuel Behaviour in Design Basis Accidents and Design Extension Conditions

Modelling of Fuel Behaviour in Design Basis Accidents and Design Extension Conditions
Author: International Atomic Energy Agency
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-07-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9789201080202

This publication is the result of an IAEA technical meeting and reports on Member States' capabilities in modelling, predicting and improving their understanding of the behaviour of nuclear fuel under accident conditions. The main results and outcomes of a coordinated research project (CRP) on this topic are also presented.

Development and Applications of a Prototypic SCALE Control Module for Automated Burnup Credit Analysis

Development and Applications of a Prototypic SCALE Control Module for Automated Burnup Credit Analysis
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 5
Release: 2001
Genre:
ISBN:

Consideration of the depletion phenomena and isotopic uncertainties in burnup-credit criticality analysis places an increasing reliance on computational tools and significantly increases the overall complexity of the calculations. An automated analysis and data management capability is essential for practical implementation of large-scale burnup credit analyses that can be performed in a reasonable amount of time. STARBUCS is a new prototypic analysis sequence being developed for the SCALE code system to perform automated criticality calculations of spent fuel systems employing burnup credit. STARBUCS is designed to help analyze the dominant burnup credit phenomena including spatial burnup gradients and isotopic uncertainties. A search capability also allows STARBUCS to iterate to determine the spent fuel parameters (e.g., enrichment and burnup combinations) that result in a desired k{sub eff} for a storage configuration. Although STARBUCS was developed to address the analysis needs for spent fuel transport and storage systems, it provides sufficient flexibility to allow virtually any configuration of spent fuel to be analyzed, such as storage pools and reprocessing operations. STARBUCS has been used extensively at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to study burnup credit phenomena in support of the NRC Research program.