Thermal Analysis of a Storage Cask for 24 Spent PWR Fuel Assemblies

The purpose of this paper is to perform a thermal analysis of a spent fuel storage cask in order to predict the maximum concrete and fuel cladding temperatures. Thermal analyses have been carried out for a storage cask under normal and off-normal conditions. The environmental temperature is assumed to be 27 under the normal condition. The off-normal condition has an environmental temperature of 40 . An additional off-normal condition is considered as a partial blockage of the air inlet ducts. Four of the eight inlet ducts are assumed to be completely blocked. The storage cask is designed to store 24 PWR spent fuel assemblies with a burn-up of 55,000 MWD/MTU and a cooling time of 7 years. The decay heat load from the 24 PWR assemblies is 25.2 kW. Thermal analyses of ventilation system have been carried out for the determination of the optimum duct size and shape. The finite volume computational fluid dynamics code FLUENT was used for the thermal analysis. In the results of the analysis, the maximum temperatures of the fuel rod and concrete overpack were lower than the allowable values under the normal condition and off-normal conditions.