Spent Fuel Transport Associated with other Dangerous Goods in Regular Train Units -Assessment of Hypothetical Explosion Impacts

Continental railway transport regulations (RID) do not exclude the transportation of spent fuel casks in a regular train unit that also contains wagons with other hazardous materials. In case of a train accident the release or reactions of those dangerous goods can potentially give significant accidental impacts onto the spent fuel casks. The assessment of fires from inflammable liquids and the explosion impacts from pressurized inflammable gases (like LPG) is well known from other studies which usually justified sufficient safety margins of the robust spent fuel cask designs [1]. A new problem to be assessed is the potential impact from a detonation blast wave from explosives transported in the same train unit as a spent fuel cask. BAM is assessing this problem by developing a numeric model to calculate the effect of a dynamic external shockwave pressure onto the cask construction. The calculation results show that the integrity of a robust monolithic cask with a screwed lid closure system is preserved considering the effect of a 21 t (equivalent weight of TNT) explosives detonation in the regular transport configuration with a distance of 25 m between the centre of the explosion and the cask front.