THERMAL EVALUATION OF ALTERNATE SHIPPING CASK FOR GTRI EXPERIMENTS

摘要

The Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) has many experiments yet to be irradiated in support of the High Performance Research Reactor fuels development program. Most of the experiments will be irradiated in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), then later shipped to the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF) located at the Materials and Fuels Complex for post irradiation examination. To date, the General Electric (GE)-2000 cask has been used to transport GTRI experiments between these facilities. However, the availability of the GE-2000 cask to support future GTRI experiments is at risk. In addition, the internal cavity of the GE-2000 cask is too short to accommodate shipping the larger GTRI experiments. Therefore, an alternate shipping capability is being pursued. The Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, Research Reactor (BRR) cask has been determined to be the best alternative to the GE-2000 cask. An evaluation of the thermal performance of the BRR cask is necessary before proceeding with fabrication of the newly designed cask hardware and the development of handling, shipping, and transport procedures. This paper presents the results of the thermal evaluation of the BRR cask loaded with a representative set of fueled and non-fueled experiments. When analyzed with identical payloads, experiment temperatures were found to be lower with the BRR cask than with the GE-2000 cask. From a thermal standpoint, the BRR cask was found to be a suitable alternate to the GE-2000 cask.