Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

There are 11,811 LWR spent fuels stored at reactor sites, as of 2009. Source terms based on reference spent fuel which represents entire spent fuels with bounding values in the aspect of source term has been applied to a design of nuclear installations, instead of those which are generated by weighting respective source term for each spent fuel. Simplified regression models to estimate total decay heat, radioactivity and ingestion hazard index for spent fuel from Westinghouse-type reactors were developed in this study, because it can be used as a fundamental model for weighting source term for respective spent fuel resulting in exclusion of conservativeness in source terms. It was found that the estimated source terms agreed with calculated value by using ORIGEN-ARP within 5%. It was also found that the conservativeness could be excluded if the weight source terms were used as reference source term in the design. Therefore, it is expected that the developed regression model could be widely used in the conceptual design process of nuclear facilities related with storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

Keywords

spent nuclear fuel,source term,discharge burnup,regression model,disposal system design