In phasing out nuclear energy production, the German reactors will be successively disconnected from the power grid, the latest ones by 2022. It is foreseen that all spent fuel assemblies will be loaded into casks by the end of 2027. After their transfer to intermediate spent fuel storage facilities (SFSFs), the SFSFs altogether will have a static inventory of more than 1,400 casks in total. The spent fuel casks will remain in SFSFs for several decades without further receipt or shipments until a geological repository for high active waste will become available. In German SFSF the two following safeguards challenges exist: First, the verification of sealing systems currently used at German SFSFs is a time consuming procedure due to the densely arranged casks in a spatially limited storage configuration. This leads to a high dose rate for inspectors and accompanying operators. The specific conditions of an intermediate SFSF in static operation entail the need for technical solutions to ease the verification of the casks and to minimize the exposure of the inspectors and storage staff to irradiation.Second, further current methods for re-verification of the content of spent fuel casks in SFSFs are not precise enough. This will become a pressing issue once the reactors have been decommissioned, because opening spent fuel casks is currently only possible in the cask loading position in the reactor. The paper addresses novel technologies potentially capable to approach these challenges.
Year
2020
Abstract