Parameters controlling the design of a sea transport system

Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co. (SKB) owns and operates a sea transport system for spent nuclear fuel, core components and other radioactive waste. The system has been in use since 1985. Spent nuclear fuel in Sweden is continuously transported from the nuclear power plants to the national intermediate storage, Clab. The lack of a reliable transport system would shortly have a severe impact on the operation for all nuclear power plants since the fuel pools on the sites are quite small. The ability of transporting spent fuel continuously is therefore essential to the operation of the nuclear power plants in Sweden.Due to new requirements and aging the sea transport system has to be replaced completely. Two key components of the system are already designed, the ship and the spent fuel/core components casks. Safety, security, capacity, redundancy, policy, economy and environmental issues all play important roles for the design. Since the system and its operation are quite complex few people have the detailed knowledge of how the different disciplines interact and impact on the design.This paper will outline on a simplified and comprehensible layman level the main choices and considerations which were made by experienced experts in different disciplines to achieve an optimized sea transport system for SKB.