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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Ibrahim Jarrah, Rizwan uddin (Univ of Illinois)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 503-512
The spent fuel dry cask should remain subcritical under normal, abnormal, and accident conditions. The cask becomes susceptible to criticality if it is misloaded with assemblies that do not conform with the Certificate of Compliance (CoC). To avoid this scenario, the cask loading process involves several verification steps to make sure that all of the loaded assemblies satisfy the CoC requirements. However, most of loading and verification steps are carried out by humans with finite probabilities for errors, which need to be quantified. In this paper, the probability of misloading a cask with light water reactor (PWR and BWR) fuel is quantified using the event tree method. Probability distribution functions for all of the human errors are obtained using the SPAR-H human reliability analysis method. The Fussell-Vesely (FV) importance measure is performed to determine the tasks that contribute the most to the having a misloaded cask. The probability of misload is found to be 5.56E-06 for cask loaded with the PWR and 2.95E-05 for the cask loaded with the BWR fuel. Both of these are considered to be small.