DROP TESTING OF THE WESTINGHOUSE FRESH NUCLEAR FUEL PACKAGE

In recent years, the Westinghouse Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility has been faced with increasing pressure from utilities that wished to take the fuel in their nuclear power plants to higher bumups. To help accommodate this trend, Westinghouse has determined that it needs the ability to increase the enrichment of the fresh fuel it delivers to its customers. One critical step in this process is to certify a new (Type A, fissile) fresh fuel package design that has the capability to transport fuel with a higher enrichment than was previously available. A prototype package was tested in support of the Safety Analysis Report of the Packaging (SARP) (NRC 1991). This paper provides detailed information on those tests and their results. Westinghouse, with the support of Pacific Nuclear Systems, designed a fresh fuel package that contains two Westinghouse PWR fuel assemblies which are enriched to 5% lP35• The new package design had a sufficiently different internal structure as compared to that of previously approved fresh fuel packages (primarily in the area of nuclear poison plates that separate the two assemblies and mechanical support of the fuel assemblies) to warrant the initiation of a test program whose results would support the theoretical analysis presented in the SARP. To maximize the usefulness of the tests, their objectives were (1) to provide sufficient test data on the impact loads experienced by the package in the tests to permit analytic demonstrations that the package is adequate to resist the normal and hypothetical accident conditions of transport, (2) to verify that the package is structurally adequate to survive hypothetical accident condition drops of 9 m while maintaining contents spacing and neutron absorber integrity required for nuclear criticality safety, and (3) to define the hypothetical accident damage to the package as an initial condition for the criticality analysis.