Establishment of a Solution for Transporting a Large Amount of Failed Fuel to Storage

Despite today’s increasingly more reliable operation of nuclear power plants, failed fuel rods exist in all Swedish nuclear power plants. Managing intermediate storage and sub-sequential final disposal of such rods has been a growing problem. The Swedish system for spent fuel management uses the principle of intermediate storage of the fuel in a central intermediate storage facility (Clab) before disposal in a final repository according to the KBS-3 method. However, the intermediate storage facility does not allow storage of failed fuel and the final repository has limitations on moisture in the deposited fuel and hence failed or broken fuel rods cannot be accepted as-is.The nuclear power companies in Sweden have jointly established the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co, SKB, to manage the spent fuel and the operational waste. To find a solution to transport the failed fuel to storage, SKB has established a project with the goal to have all currently failed fuel rods from all the Swedish nuclear power plants reconditioned and transported to the intermediate storage facility before the year of 2020. The project has established the acceptance criteria for reconditioned failed fuel in the final repository and evaluated a number of options for treatment, encapsulation and transportation of the failed fuel rods. Furthermore, two suppliers have developed reconditioning methods fulfilling the criteria and contracts were signed with both suppliers in May 2016.This paper outlines the details of the Swedish solution for transportation of the failed fuel to storage, including the necessary steps of reconditioning, package selection and licensing issues from both a transporter and operators perspective.