CASTOR®30 Years of Experience in TransportFar beyond storage: particular challenges for transport & shuttle casks

For more than 40 years the German company GNS Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service mbH has de-signed and manufactured CASTOR® casks for the transport and storage of spent fuel assemblies, ofwhich by now almost 1,500 casks have been loaded and stored worldwide. Any of these casks fulfilthe function of dual-purpose casks by having granted type B(U)F approval certificates in compliancewith the international regulations of the IAEA enabling the storage facility operators to easily transportthe casks off-site without reloading at any time (“load-and-go” principle).However, among the large variety of the CASTOR® type series, GNS has also developed specificcasks for the transport and shuttle of spent fuel assemblies and high-level waste. As an example, fromthe years 1990 to 2003, in total 136 spent nuclear fuel transports were performed from German nucle-ar power plants to the reprocessing plant in Sellafield, UK, using the CASTOR® S1 cask. In Finlandand Russia, for instance, other CASTOR® cask types are still in use for the frequent routine of on-siteshuttle campaigns of spent fuel assemblies from reactor units to interim storage facilities for evenmore than 30 years now. A very recent and specific application of shuttling was the transfer of threequivers for damaged fuel rods between Units A and B at the German NPP Biblis loaded in aCASTOR® V/19. These quivers are designed by GNS as first of its kind solution for the disposal ofPWR and BWR damaged fuel rods in Germany.Since each loading and handling operation imposes considerably higher loads to the entire cask andits individual components as compared with those at the storage position, especially the use as shuttlecasks impressively proves the robustness and durability of the CASTOR® cask technology, even fortransports under extreme conditions for various purposes.This presentation will provide an outline of the GNS cask types which have already been in transportoperation for an exceptionally long period in a number of countries all over the world.