Abstract
With civilian nuclear power use on the rise, demand for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) safeguards has increased. One potential method for monitoring the storage and transport of spent fuel is to detect the decay heat signature generated by a spent fuel package. SNF rods are imbedded in borosilicate glass, forming a package that is encapsulated within a double canister. Adapting a Microsoft Excel computational simulation of the SNF package heat transfer, the temperature profiles for three SNF storage models were calculated from which the resulting maximum and glass surface temperatures were determined. The resulting Excel maximum and imbedding borosilicate glass surface temperatures were compared with results obtained using the COMSOL Multiphysics software. The objective was to test the limitations of the Excel heat signature simulation. According to the results, when all three models consist of 144 SNFs stored 5 years after discharge, as well as a 53.6% glass composition, the glass surface temperature deviations were approximately 8.1% for model 1, 4.7% for model 2, and 2.5% for model 3. For the maximum temperatures, the deviations were approximately 5% for model 1, 2.5% for model 2, and 4.5% for model 3.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 83-86 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Transactions of the American Nuclear Society |
| Volume | 126 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
| Event | 2022 Transactions of the American Nuclear Society Annual Meeting, ANS 2022 - Anaheim, United States Duration: Jun 12 2022 → Jun 16 2022 |
Funding
Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This publication has been created by UChicago Argonne LLC, operator of Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and UT-Battelle LLC, operator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). ANL’s work was partially supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. ORNL, a DOE Office of Science laboratory, is operated under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725. The US government retains for itself, and others acting on its behalf, a paid-up nonexclusive, irrevocable worldwide license in said article to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, by or on behalf of the Government. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan. (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan)
