A full-scale prototype of vertical ventilated spent fuel dry storage canister is tested to evaluate its heat removal performance. Specifically, a temporary shelter is built to resemble the factory encompassing dry storage canisters. Electrical heating components with designed heat power are designed to represent the spent fuel assemblies inside the canister. From the test data its accordance with thermal safety related rules and guidance is proved. Furthermore, these data are compared with the simulated results, and the simulated results using CFD computer code of CFX. It is shown that the temperatures obtained from test agree well with the simulated results, and the simulated temperature of each component is no more than 10% higher than the test data, the velocity inside air-channel is in range of 1m/s, which is close to the environmental wind velocity of mid-summer of the testing site. It is also shown that conductive heat transfer vial air channel between the concrete over-pack and the steel canister covers more than 2/3 of the total heat load, indicating that conductive heat transfer plays a major role compared with heat conduction and radiation. From the full-scale prototype testing, it is shown that the vertical dry storage canister design has inherited conservatism from the aspect of thermal safety, And it is reasonable and acceptable to use CFD numerical calculation method for thermal analysis of this type of ventilated spent fuel dry storage system.
The decay heat removal analysis is considered as one of the four items of dry storage system safety analysis in addition to criticality analysis, confinement analyses and radiation protection analysis. This paper has illustrated the related standards and rules to be followed, and demonstrated the CFD simulation of a vertical spent fuel dry storage cask. Furthermore, the thermal analysis is applied in developing new materials, and the optimization of loading schemes in one operation. The above applications have proved that thermal analysis plays critical role in the design and operation of spent fuel dry storage system.
To solve the problem of low thermal safety margin, bad heat conductivity and lack of experiment data for performance against accumulative radiation in current concrete developed for spent fuel dry storage all over the world, a specific high performance concrete material with three mixed components and high tension steel fibre has be proposed and developed. It is proved by the experiment data that 1) the concrete material can withstand 180 °C for long term, 300 °C for 168 hours and 800 °C (as an accidental case) for 20 minutes, after which there is no observable cracks and flakes; 2) the heat conductivity of the material can be enhanced 27%, with the help of steel fibre inserted, which can significantly enhance the heat load of spent fuel assemblies to be loaded in dry storage container; 3) the material can withstand a total neutron dose of 1 × 1017n/cm2 and gamma dose of 2.4 × 107Gy, which is expected during 60 years of spent fuel storage. The performance of the material is better than that of current concrete material used for spent fuel dry storage all over the world. The material enhances the thermal safety, structural safety and radiation protection safety during spent fuel dry storage, which can be applied at the same time in other technical area with high temperature and high radiation conditions.
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