DEVELOPMENT OF A MODELING APPROACH TO ESTIMATE RADIATION FROM A SPENT FUEL ROD QUIVER

¹ Division of Applied Nuclear Physics, Uppsala University Ångströmlaboratoriet, Lägerhyddsvägen 1, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
² Westinghouse AB Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB, Västerås, Sweden

zsolt.elter@physics.uu.se
sophie.grape@physics.uu.se

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

Before encapsulation of spent nuclear fuel in a geological repository, the fuels need to be verified for safeguards purposes. This requirement applies to all spent fuel assemblies, including those with properties or designs that are especially challenging to verify. One such example are quivers, a new type of containers used to hold damaged spent fuel rods. After placing damaged rods inside the quivers, they are sealed with a thick lid and the water is removed. The lid is thick enough to significantly reduce the amount of the gamma radiation penetrating through it, which can make safeguards verification from the top using gamma techniques difficult. Considering that the number of quivers at storage facilities is foreseen to increase in near future, studying the feasibility of verification is timely.

In this paper we make a feasibility study related to safeguards verification of quivers, aimed at investigating the gamma and neutron radiation field around a quiver designed by Westinghouse AB and filled with PWR fuel rods irradiated at the Swedish Ringhals site. A simplified geometry of the quiver and the detailed operational history of each rod are provided by Westinghouse and the reactor operator, respectively.

The nuclide inventory of the rods placed in the quiver and the emission source terms are calculated with ORIGEN-ARP. The radiation transport is modeled with the Serpent2 Monte Carlo code. The first objective is to assess the capability of the spent fuel attribute tester (SFAT) to verify the content for nuclear safeguards purposes. The results show that the thick quiver lid attenuates the gamma radiation, thereby making gamma radiation based verification from above the quiver difficult.