Modelling of water consumption in a spent fuel storage facility

摘要

In current practice, spent fuel is most commonly stored in a special basin of distilled or demineralised water for a required time period to reduce the amount of heat generated by radioactive decay to a level that can permit reprocessing. The processes taking place inside the spent fuel induce complex processes in the storage basin. The loss of water from the storage basin by means of simultaneous heat and mass transfer between water and the surrounding air is the case analysed in this paper by modelling. The developed model can be easily coupled with others, particularly models providing a consistent explanation of known situations (oxygen delivery from the basin, discharging of gases generated by processes from the fuel, increasing of the water activity, etc.). In this paper, some concrete references are related to the spent fuel storage facility at Magurele, Romania.