Thermal Evaluations for Hypothetically Drain-Down Spent Fuel Storage Facility at SRS
- Savannah River National Laboratory, Aiken, SC 29808 (United States)
The L-Area Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) underwater storage facility at Savannah River Site (SRS), referred to as L-Basin SNF facility, has an array of Vertical Tube Storage (VTS) racks and a group of High Flux Irradiation Reactor (HFIR) fuel cores. The underwater facility is integrally designed as a wet SNF storage system with a chemically-controlled water pool. The SNF storage racks are seismically qualified. The L-Basin pool holds about 3.4 million gallons of water with concrete wall thickness of about 5 ft and water depths of 17 ft to 30 ft. The facility has mainly two different elevation levels of 30 ft and 17 ft below the ground level. At the level 30 ft below the ground, a maximum of 110 racks of VTS and 5 racks of Dry Cave can be stored. At the level of 17 ft below the ground, 120 HFIR cores can be stored, considering that each rack contains two HFIR cores. In case of a hypothetical accident, all cooling water in the storage pool may be drained away, resulting in dry SNF storage condition. The primary objective of the work is to estimate the maximum fuel temperature in a conservative manner when the L-Basin facility is completely dry due to the hypothetical drain-down of the pool water. A three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling approach was taken for the thermal evaluations of the water-drained SNF storage facility. The modeling calculations were performed, assuming that all of the storage racks in L-Basin are fully loaded with SNF assemblies containing decay heat sources. In the case of full loading, the L-Basin facility stores 14,600 SNF assemblies in VTS racks and 120 cores in HFIR racks. The thermal analysis results of the L-Basin model yielded maximum temperatures of VTS and HFIR fuel assemblies for different fuel loading scenarios and boundary conditions of the SNF storage racks.
- OSTI ID:
- 23050412
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 116; Conference: 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Nuclear Society, San Francisco, CA (United States), 11-15 Jun 2017; Other Information: Country of input: France; 7 refs.; available from American Nuclear Society - ANS, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (US); ISSN 0003-018X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE WASTES, AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
AFTER-HEAT
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CONCRETES
COOLING
FLUID MECHANICS
FUEL ASSEMBLIES
GROUND LEVEL
HEAT SOURCES
HYPOTHETICAL ACCIDENTS
IRRADIATION REACTORS
SAVANNAH RIVER PLANT
SPENT FUEL STORAGE
SPENT FUELS
STORAGE FACILITIES
THERMAL ANALYSIS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
WATER