Publications

Aerosol Deposition Inside a Spent Fuel Transportation and Storage Canister (Interim Report)

Phillips, Jesse P.; Gelbard, Fred G.

This report documents the progress in preparing the ANSYS/Fluent^® and MELCOR models to perform characterization studies of aerosols dispersal and deposition within a select spent fuel cask system. Steady state thermal-hydraulic cask response is modeled with both codes, at present, while the MELCOR source code is being modified to allow imposed thermal-hydraulic conditions with aerosol physics calculations. This will allow the MELCOR model to assume the thermal-hydraulic calculation from the ANSYS/Fluent^®, while only computing the aerosol physics. Detailed results are presented on the thermal-hydraulic analysis of the MAGNASTOR^® cask for the current ANSYS/Fluent^® model, with convergent conditions observed over two fidelities. While the MELCOR computation computes the steady state conditions, they differ sufficiently from that computed with ANSYS/Fluent^®. The MELCOR analysis include a set of UO₂ sources to investigate system response for interim reporting. The airborne concentrations and evolving distributions are presented. Model development is anticipated to continue as additional components impacting flow conditions or aerosol deposition within the MAGNASTOR^® cask and Westinghouse fuel assemblies are identified.