Rail Package Transportation Loads Transmitted to Spent Nuclear Fuel Assemblies

摘要

Equipos Nucleares, S.A. (ENSA) and the US Department of Energy are preparing a full scale test of a commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) dual-purpose cask to study the loading conditions applied to SNF under normal conditions of transportation. The test campaign will use a commercial transportation package that is loaded with two or three instrumented fuel assemblies (loaded with surrogate material to represent the mass of SNF) to measure strains at cladding locations and accelerations on the fuel assemblies. Accelerometers will also be used at various locations throughout the full conveyance system to study the transmission of loads through the system and provide validation for numerical models. Preliminary numerical models have been developed to study the transmission of postulated shock and vibration loads through the commercial package conveyance system. After the test campaign is concluded, these models will be validated against the test data and then used to estimate the response of real SNF to the normal conditions of rail transportation loading environment. The current study uses the preliminary models to evaluate the load transmission through the system and calculate pre-test predictions of the fuel assembly response.