Transportation

With the significant advances in additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing, Orano Federal Services and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte recently re-examined the capabilities to print impact limiters for transportation casks used to ship spent nuclear fuel. Impact limiters protect transportation casks (sometimes also referred to as transportation overpacks) and their contents during an accident. Impact limiter designs must withstand testing based on a certain significance level of hypothetical accidents, including drops, crushing, fires, and immersion in water.

Argonne National Laboratory, located in Lemont, Ill., outside of Chicago, continues to develop a U.S. Department of Energy Packaging University Summer Institute by leveraging the laboratory’s educational resources and workforce development opportunities that support STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The institute will be open to both professionals in the nuclear packaging field and highly qualified graduate university students who are recommended by their advisors.

The Optimized Segmentation process patented by Orano Decommissioning Services was successfully implemented for the first time at the Crystal River Unit 3 (CR-3) decommissioning project in Florida [1]. Using this approach, Orano was able to avoid the time- and resource-intensive process of packaging components into numerous standardized waste containers and significantly reduced the required segmentation activities.

Inspired by a history of similar testing endeavors and recommended by the National Academy of Sciences and the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, the Department of Energy is planning to conduct physical demonstrations on rail-sized spent nuclear fuel transportation casks. As part of the project, called the Spent Nuclear Fuel Package Performance Demonstration (PPD), the DOE is considering a number of demonstrations based on regulatory tests and realistic transportation scenarios, including collisions, drops, exposure to fire, and immersion in water.

As highlighted in the Spring 2024 issue of Radwaste Solutions, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are developing and deploying ARG-US—meaning “Watchful Guardian”—remote monitoring systems technologies to enhance the safety, security, and safeguards (3S) of packages of nuclear and other radioactive material during storage, transportation, and disposal.

Orano USA announced that it has recently completed the transportation and disposal of the dismantled Crystal River Unit 3 reactor using only four large packages, which were shipped more than 1,800 miles each by barge and multi-axle trailer from the nuclear power reactor’s site on Florida’s west coast to Waste Control Specialists’ disposal facility in Andrews County, Texas.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has wrapped up testing of its Atlas railcar, successfully completing a round-trip journey from Pueblo, Colo., to Scoville, Idaho. Built to safety standards set by the Association of American Railroads (AAR), the 12-axle railcar is designed to transport large containers of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering changes to its rules governing the transportation of radioactive materials, having received and docketed a petition for rulemaking from the Tribal Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee (TRMTC) asking that the agency revise its regulations on when tribal governments are provided advance notification of such shipments.

As announced in the April 9 Federal Register, the NRC is examining the issues raised in the petition to determine whether they should be considered in rulemaking. The NRC is also requesting public comments on the rulemaking petition, to be submitted by June 23.

The government of the United Kingdom conducted a series of tests in the 1980s to assess the robustness of spent nuclear fuel packages. One such test involved ramming a 140-ton diesel locomotive into a transportation canister, called a nuclear flask, at 100 miles per hour. The test, according to a recent article published by the online magazine The Drive, was a “smashing” success. Just 0.29 psi of pressure escaped the 50-ton test flask, which had been pressurized to 100 psi.

A large-scale campaign to move spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States to a central repository or interim storage site does not appear to be coming anytime soon. External pressures, however, including a growing number of nuclear power plant closures and increased stakeholder demand to remove stranded spent fuel and HLW, are shifting focus to building the infrastructure needed to move large volumes of waste. This includes the design and manufacture of shielded transportation casks for shipping the waste by truck or rail.

The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB or Board) recently completed an evaluation of Department of Energy activities related to transporting spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste. These topics have been the subject of several Board meetings and associated reports, and in September 2019, the Board issued a report, Preparing for Nuclear Waste Transportation–Technical Issues That Need to Be Addressed in Preparing for a Nationwide Effort to Transport Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste [1], which focuses on the issues DOE will need to address to plan and implement an integrated transportation program. In its report, the Board describes 30 broad technical issues that DOE needs to address and offers three sets of findings and recommendations.