Spent Fuel Status in Korea and Integrity Evaluation

The spent fuel (SF) disposal is to be hot issue since the year of plant storage capability is coming soon in Korea. To solve this facial problem, interim storage is a realistic countermeasure other than many other back-end cycle options. To this end, the SF integrity evaluation is considered as a sort of key technology to implement this process. In particular, since Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the higher safety requirements have been stressed in the nuclear industry. Going along with this atmosphere, the integrity and evaluation of SF has risen to be more important than ever before. The physical behavior of SF, however, is quiet complex, not easily tractable and exactly predictable since this is connected with the environments of its previous in-reactor operation conditions and cooling time. Fewer activities have been performed including even regulation field in Korea as of now because of various kinds of situations such as political, social, industrial matters etc. In order to draw the future pictorial system of SF integrity, this study suggests a promising candidate practice for SF integrity evaluation approach suitable for domestic environment.