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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Venkata V. R. Venigalla, Miles Greiner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 313-324
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8966
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A two-dimensional finite volume mesh of a legal-weight truck cask cross section is constructed, including four pressurized water reactor fuel assemblies inside. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations calculate buoyancy-driven gas motion, natural convection and radiation heat transfer in geometrically accurate gas-filled fuel regions, and conduction within the solid components. Steady-state simulations are performed with the cask in a normal transportation environment for ranges of fuel heat generation rate and cladding emissivity, with atmospheric-pressure helium or nitrogen cover gases. The cask thermal dissipation capacity is defined as the fuel heat generation rate that brings the fuel cladding temperature to its allowed limit. That capacity is 23% higher when helium is the cover gas than for nitrogen. Increasing the cladding emissivity by 10% increases the capacity by 4% for nitrogen, but only 2% for helium. Stagnant-gas simulations using the geometrically accurate mesh predict essentially the same cask thermal dissipation capacity as simulations that include gas motion. This indicates that buoyancy-induced gas motion is not strong enough to significantly enhance heat transfer for this configuration. Simulations employing effective thermal conductivities and homogenized (nongeometrically accurate) meshes in the fuel regions predict cask thermal capacities that are 3 to 8% lower than the geometrically accurate CFD simulations. Basket surface temperatures calculated in this work will be used as boundary conditions in future benchmark experiments.