Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

The spent fuel stored in the pool is vulnerable to external impacts, since the severe reactor conditions degrade the structural integrity of the fuel. Therefore an accident during shipping and handling should be considered. In an extreme case, the fuel assembly drop can be happened accidentally during handling the nuclear fuel in the spent fuel pool. The rod failure during such drop accident can be evaluated by calculating the impact force acting on the fuel assembly at the bottom of the spent fuel pool. The impact force can be evaluated with the impact velocity at the bottom of the spent fuel pool. Since fuel rods occupies most of weight and volume of a nuclear fuel assembly, the information of the rods are important to estimate the hydraulic resistance force. In this study, the hydraulic force acting on the 3×3 short rod bundle model during the drop accident is calculated, and the result is verified by comparing the numerical simulations. The methodology suggested by this study is expected to be useful for evaluating the integrity of the spent fuel.

Keywords

Spent fuel,Drop accident,Impact velocity