A Complete NUHOMS® Solution for Storage and Transport of High Burnup Spent Fuel

The discharge burnups of spent fuel from nuclear power plants keep increasing with plants discharging or planning to discharge fuel with burnups in excess of 60,000 MWD/MTU. Due to limited capacity of spent fuel pools, transfer of older cooler spent fuel from fuel pool to dry storage, and very limited options for transport of spent fuel, there is a critical need for dry storage of high burnup, higher heat load spent fuel so that plants could maintain their full core offload reserve capability. A typical NUHOMS® solution for dry spent fuel storage is shown in the Figure 1. Transnuclear, Inc. offers two advanced NUHOMS® solutions for the storage and transportation of high burnup fuel. One includes the NUHOMS® 24PTH system for plants with 90.7 Metric Ton (MT) crane capacity; the other offers the higher capacity NUHOMS® 32PTH system for higher crane capacity. These systems include NUHOMS® - 24PTH and -32PTH Transportable Canisters stored in a concrete storage overpack (HSM-H). These canisters are designed to meet all the requirements of both storage and transport regulations. They are designed to be transported off-site either directly from the spent fuel pool or from the storage overpack in a suitable transport cask. The payload includes PWR fuel assemblies with an assembly average burnup of 62,000 MWD/MTU, 5.0 wt% U235 enrichment and 3 years minimum cooling time. The total heat load at the time of storage is 40.8 kW and 34.8 kW for the -24PTH and -32PTH system respectively. These two NUHOMS® systems by Transnuclear offer the industry a complete solution for storage and transportation of high burnup fuel.