Capabilities for processing shipping casks at spent fuel storage facilities
Spent fuel is received at a storage facility in heavily shielded casks transported either by rail or truck. The casks are inspected, cooled, emptied, decontaminated, and reshipped. The spent fuel is transferred to storage. The number of locations or space inside the building provided to perform each function in cask processing will determine the rate at which the facility can process shipping casks and transfer spent fuel to storage. Because of the high cost of construction of licensed spent fuel handling and storage facilities and the difficulty in retrofitting, it is desirable to correctly specify the space required. In this paper, the size of the cask handling facilities is specified as a function of rate at which spent fuel is received for storage. The minimum number of handling locations to achieve a given throughput of shipping casks has been determined by computer simulation of the process. The simulation program uses a Monte Carlo technique in which a large number of casks are received at a facility with a fixed number of handling locations in each process area. As a cask enters a handling location, the time to process the cask at that location is selected at random from the distribution of process time. Shipping cask handling times are based on experience at the General Electric Storage Facility, Morris, Illinois. Shipping cask capacity is based on the most recent survey available of the expected capability of reactors to handle existing rail or truck casks.
- Research Organization:
- Du Pont de Nemours (E.I.) and Co., Aiken, SC (USA). Savannah River Lab.
- DOE Contract Number:
- EY-76-C-09-0001
- OSTI ID:
- 7068334
- Report Number(s):
- DP-MS-78-10; CONF-780622-33; TRN: 78-016040
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ANS annual meeting, San Diego, CA, USA, 18 Jun 1978
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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