Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

AbstracThermal assessment of a new CANDU spent fuel disposal system, which improves the retrievability of the spent fuel and enhances the densification factor compared with the Korean Reference disposal System, is carried out in this study. The canisters for CANDU spent fuels are stored for long term and cooled by natural convection in the proposed disposal system for the retrievability. The steady state thermal analyses for proposed CANDU disposal system are carried out with the ANSYS 10.0 CFX code. The thermal analyses are performed through two steps. At the first step, the sensitivity of the disposal tunnel spacing is analysed. The differences of maximum temperatures by several tunnel spacings are calculated at three points in the disposal tunnel. The result shows that the differences of the temperature at the three points are almost negligible because 99% of the decay heat is removed by natural convection. At the second procedure, 60 m tunnel spacing with a ventilation system instead of natural convection is considered. The result is applied to the calculation of the canister surface temperature in disposal tunnel as boundary conditions. Consequently, the average and the maximum surface temperature of disposal canisters are 79.9℃ and 119℃, respectively. The inner maximum temperature of a basket in the disposal canister is calculated as 140.9℃. The maximum temperature of the basket meets the thermal requirement for the CANDU spent fuel cladding.

Keywords

Radioactive waste management,CANDU Spent nuclear fuel,Long-term dry storage,Retrievability,Natural convection,Disposal Canister