Publications Details
Use of a commercial heat transfer code to predict horizontally oriented spent fuel rod temperatures
Radioactive spent fuel assemblies are a source of hazardous waste that will have to be dealt with in the near future. It is anticipated that the spent fuel assemblies will be transported to disposal sites in spent fuel transportation casks. In order to design a reliable and safe transportation cask, the maximum cladding temperature of the spent fuel rod arrays must be calculated. The maximum rod temperature is a limiting factor in the amount of spent fuel that can be loaded in a transportation cask. The scope of this work is to demonstrate that reasonable and conservative spent fuel rod temperature predictions can be made using commercially available thermal analysis codes. The demonstration is accomplished by a comparison between numerical temperature predictions, with a commercially available thermal analysis code, and experimental temperature data for electrical rod heaters simulating a horizontally oriented spent fuel rod bundle.