The TN 24 Dual-Purpose Cask Program for Doel, Belgium

At the present time, the Belgian utility ELECTRABEL operates 7 PWR nuclear units located on two sites (Tihange and Doel). Part of the spent fuel has been or will be reprocessed at the COGEMA facility at La Hague and the other are currently stored in the spent fuel pools of the units. Synatom. the Belgian nuclear fuel management organization, has asked the engineering and consulting company Belgatom to perform a technical and economic study in order to define the most appropriate solutions for interim storage facilities in order to keep available the capacity of the existing pools. Finally. the conclusion of the study led, for the Doel site, to a dry storage in metallic dual purpose casks in a non-bunkered concrete building. The main advantages of this solution are its flexibility and its reversibility: the casks are ordered according to the need ·and can be used to transport the spent fuel either to a reprocessing facility or to a conditioning facility according to future decisions.