While establishment of appropriate policies and securing key technologies on spent nuclear fuels are state-of-the-arts in the world due to saturation of fuel pools and/or temporary facilities, the details of transportation, storage and repository are different depending on the situation in each country. Thereby, accurate integrity assessment of specific transportation casks and contained fuel assemblies as well as their breakdown effects on the public and environment are becoming more important. The purpose of this study is to carry out parametric stress analyses of spent nuclear fuel assembly in a prototypal dual purpose cask under development. As the representative postulated accident conditions, four situations were selected such as vertical, horizontal, 15° and 45° drop from 9 m height on to the ground. Then, taking into account computational cost, a simple model that considers only the equivalent mass of the fuel assembly was made for preliminary finite element analyses to determine the most dangerous drop condition and critical location. Subsequently, a detailed model that considers the acceleration of fuel assembly was made based on the preliminary analysis results and finite element analyses were carried out to calculate engineering parameters. Resulting membrane and bending stress intensities were compared with allowable design limits, of which findings will be used as technical background for development of transportation cask and management of the spent nuclear fuel integrity.


Comparative Stress Analyses of Dropped Spent Nuclear Fuel Assembly in a Prototypal Cask

Division / Sponsors: 
Pressure Vessels & Piping (PVP)


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/PVP2020/volume/83815

PVP2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.