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Numerical Estimation of the Spent Fuel Ratio

Lindgren, Eric R.; Durbin, S.G.; Wilke, Jason W.; Margraf, J.M.; Dunn, T.A.D.

Sabotage of spent nuclear fuel casks remains a concern nearly forty years after attacks against shipment casks were first analyzed and has a renewed relevance in the post-9/11 environment. A limited number of full-scale tests and supporting efforts using surrogate materials, typically depleted uranium dioxide (DUO 2 ), have been conducted in the interim to more definitively determine the source term from these postulated events. However, the validity of these large- scale results remain in question due to the lack of a defensible spent fuel ratio (SFR), defined as the amount of respirable aerosol generated by an attack on a mass of spent fuel compared to that of an otherwise identical surrogate. Previous attempts to define the SFR in the 1980's have resulted in estimates ranging from 0.42 to 12 and include suboptimal experimental techniques and data comparisons. Because of the large uncertainty surrounding the SFR, estimates of releases from security-related events may be unnecessarily conservative. Credible arguments exist that the SFR does not exceed a value of unity. A defensible determination of the SFR in this lower range would greatly reduce the calculated risk associated with the transport and storage of spent nuclear fuel in dry cask systems. In the present work, the shock physics codes CTH and ALE3D were used to simulate spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and DUO 2 targets impacted by a high-velocity jet at an ambient temperature condition. These preliminary results are used to illustrate an approach to estimate the respirable release fraction for each type of material and ultimately, an estimate of the SFR. This page intentionally blank

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Numerical estimation of the Spent Fuel Ratio

15th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference 2015, IHLRWM 2015

Durbin, S.G.; Lindgren, Eric R.; Wilke, Jason W.; Jameson, Kevin J.

Sabotage of spent nuclear fuel casks remains a concern nearly forty years after attacks against shipment casks were first analyzed and has a renewed relevance in the post-9/11 environment. A limited number of full-scale tests and supporting efforts using surrogate materials, typically depleted uranium dioxide (DUO2), have been conducted in the interim to more definitively determine the source term from these postulated events. In all the previous studies, the postulated attack of greatest interest was by a conical shape charge (CSC) that focuses the explosive energy much more efficiently than bulk explosives. However, the validity of these large-scale results remain in question due to the lack of a defensible Spent Fuel Ratio (SFR), defined as the amount of respirable aerosol generated by an attack on a mass of spent fuel compared to that of an otherwise identical surrogate. Previous attempts to define the SFR in the 1980's have resulted in estimates ranging from 0.42 to 12 and include suboptimal experimental techniques and data comparisons. Because of the large uncertainty surrounding the SFR, estimates of releases from security-related events may be unnecessarily conservative. Credible arguments exist that the SFR does not exceed a value of unity. A defensible determination of the SFR in this lower range would greatly reduce the calculated risk associated with the transport and storage of spent nuclear fuel in dry cask systems. In the present work, the CTH shock physics code is used to simulate spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and DUO2 targets impacted by a CSC jet at an ambient temperature condition. These preliminary results are used to illustrate an approach to estimate the respirable release fraction for each type of material and ultimately, an estimate of the SFR.

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Post-processing V&V Level II ASC Milestone (2843) results

Moreland, Kenneth D.; Wilke, Jason W.; Attaway, Stephen W.; Karelitz, David B.

The 9/30/2008 ASC Level 2 Post-Processing V&V Milestone (Milestone 2843) contains functionality required by the user community for certain verification and validation tasks. These capabilities include fragment detection from CTH simulation data, fragment characterization and analysis, and fragment sorting and display operations. The capabilities were tested extensively both on sample and actual simulations. In addition, a number of stretch criteria were met including a comparison between simulated and test data, and the ability to output each fragment as an individual geometric file.

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13 Results
13 Results