TN24 Mk II: A High Capacity Dry Cask for Storage and Transport of Long Cooled Fuel

Storage of spent fuel from Light Water Reactors is an important aspect of strategies currently developed or implemented world-wide by electric utilities for their spent fuel management. At present, contrary to what was anticipated when most of the nuclear power stations have been erected, only a small fraction of this spent fuel has been or wiU be reprocessed and large unexpected quantities shall be stored until a final solution can be available for their disposal. Until now, wet storage At Reactor in a spent fuel pool was the principal storage mode. However space shortage, even after re-racking, has now become an acute problem at the nuclear power plants of many countries and some of them are already involved in the consttuction of facilities to expand their storage capacity, particularly using dry storage concept and technology. As a matter of fact, dry storage in steel casks offers utilities a viable solution to circumvent this prob:em, especially considering the fact that the feasibility of dry storage has been demonstrated for all L WR fuel types . This paper describes a newly developed version of a high capacity dry cask for storage and transport of long cooled fuel named the \"TN24 Mk ll\", which is now at the final development stage. This development has been undertaken within the framework of a joint development program between Transnucleaire and Kobe Steel Ltd. In order to achieve our goal, we gathered our respective knowhow and expertise in the fields of design and fabrication.