The risks associated with the transport of spent nuclear fuel by truck and rail have been reexamined and compared to results published in NUREG-O170 and the Modal Study. The full reexamination considered transport of PWR and BWR spent fuel by truck and rail in four generic Type B spent fuel casks. Because they are typical, this paper presents results only for transport of PWR spent fuel in steel-lead steel casks. Cask and spent fuel response to collision impacts and fires were evaluated by performing three-dimensional finite element and one-dimensional heat transport calculations. Accident release fractions were developed by critical review of literature data. Accident severity fractions were developed from Modal Study truck and rail accident event trees, modified to reflect the frequency of occurrence of hard and soft rock wayside route surfaces as determined by analysis of geographic data. Incident-free population doses and the population dose risks associated with the accidents that might occur during transport were calculated using the RADTRAN 5 transportation risk code. The calculated incident-free doses were compared to those published in NUREG-O170. The calculated accident dose risks were compared to dose risks calculated using NUREG-0170 and Modal Study accident source terms. The comparisons demonstrated that both of these studies made a number of very conservative assumptions about spent fuel and cask response to accident conditions, which caused their estimates of accident source terms, accident frequencies, and accident consequences to also be very conservative. The results of this study and the previous studies demonstrate that the risks associated with the shipment of spent fuel by truck or rail are very small.
Reexamination of Spent Fuel Shipment Risk Estimates
2000
10 pages
Report
No indication
English
Radiation Shielding, Protection, & Safety , Radioactive Wastes & Radioactivity , Spent reactor fuels , Rail transportation , Waste transportation , Trucks , Land transportation , Boiling water reactors , Pressurized water reactors , Casks , Truck accidents , Railroad accidents , Steel , Lead alloys , Collisions , Finite element method , Heat transfer , Vehicle fires , Accident rates , Risk assessment , Spent fuel shipment , RADTRAN5 computer program , EDB/000000
SAFE SHIPMENT OF NAVAL SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL
Springer Verlag | 2006
|Safe Shipment of Naval Spent Nuclear Fuel
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2006
|