Year
1990
Abstract
Current criteria for criticality safety for spent fuel shipping and storage casks are conservative because no credit is permitted for the effects of burnup of the fuel inside the cask. Cask designs that will transport and store large numbers of fuel assemblies (20 or more) must devote a substantial part of their payload to criticality control measures if they are to meet this criteria. The Department of Energy is developing the data necessary to support safety analyses that incorporate the effects of burnup for the next generation of spent fuel shipping casks. The efforts described here are devoted to the development of acceptance criteria that will be the basis for accepting safety analyses. The consideration of criticality safety criteria that will include the effects of burnup must be based upon two principals: (1) criticality safety is assured even after two inadvertent operational or accidental errors, and (2) all uncertainties and biases are included in the evaluation of the criticality safety margin. Preliminary estimates of the uncertainties of the effects of burnup have been developed to provide a basis for the consideration of criticality safety criteria. The criticality safety margins in a spent fuel shipping or storage cask are dominated by the portions of a fuel assembly that are in low power regions of a reactor core, and the reactor operating conditions are very different from spent fuel storage or transport cask conditions. Consequently, the experience that has been gathered during years of reactor operation does not apply directly to the prediction of criticality safety margins for spent fuel shipping or storage casks. The preliminary estimates of the uncertainties presented in this paper must be refined by both analytical and empirical studies that address both the magnitude of the uncertainties and their interdependence.