THERMAL ANALYSIS OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL PACKAGES EXPOSED TOSELECTED SEVERE HISTORIC ACCIDENTS INVOLVING FIRES

摘要

Radioactive material packages are required to withstand the hypothetical accident conditionsrngiven in 10CFR71.73 [1] without releasing their contents. The thermal hypothetical accidentrncondition is defined as an exposure to a 30-minute, fully engulfing fire and is intended tornenvelop the severity of the vast majority of possible real accidents. While the thermal insult to arnpackage from this environment is well defined, that from real world accidents (actual orrnpostulated) is difficult to quantify. A recent paper by Ammerman et al. [2] investigated a set ofrnactual transportation accidents and compared them to the hypothetical accident conditions thatrnspent fuel casks are designed to survive. The types of accidents that were investigated included arnpropane tanker truck explosion, a train derailment with subsequent hazardous material fire, and arnrail tanker rupture and subsequent butane fire. However, detailed thermal analyses of thesernaccidents were not performed.rnThis paper presents the results of analyses using the CAFé fire code to determine the response ofrnthermally massive spent nuclear fuel transportation packages to some of these historic accidents.rnResults from the computer simulations are also compared to the hypothetical accidentrnenvironment described in 10CFR71.73. The results of this work can be used to demonstrate tornthe public how the regulatory hypothetical accident conditions compare to actual severernaccidents that are in the historical record.