Meet the Challenges of Spent Fuel Interim Storage by Using Intensive Innovation

AREVA Logistics Business Unit, through its entities TN International in France, Transnuclear Inc. in the USA and Transnuclear Ltd. in Japan, has proposed for more than 2 decades the leading dry storage systems of spent fuel in use today. These systems have mainly been sold in Europe, in the US and in Japan. The PWR, BWR or VVER fuel characteristics may have various enrichment values up to 5%, various cooling time down to 2 years and various burnups up to 65,000 MWd/tU. Facing the current international trend towards expanding Spent Fuel Interim Storage capabilities and the unpredictable market prices of steel large forged components, AREVA Logistics Business Unit has launched an extensive innovation process to create the new generation of dry interim storage systems: i) the TN®DUO cask is an innovative and cost effective dual purpose cask; and ii) the TN®NOVA system is an innovative canister system based on the NUHOMS® cask system, the US industry leading spent fuel storage solution. These two innovative solutions can naturally be transported to the storage facilities as well as other sites such as reprocessing facilities or geological repositories depending of the national strategy for the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle. In addition to these innovative dry interim storage systems and based on 40 years experience in design, licensing and fabrication of baskets for transportation cask, AREVA Logistics Business Unit has developed new innovative designs for Underwater Fuel Storage Racks which includes the use of Metal Matrix Composite (MMC) material as a neutron absorbing material. This kind of material allows proposing a cost efficient solution with a reduced rack weight and a significant improvement of the criticality performance. Furthermore, AREVA Logistics Business Unit Rack Design remains flexible and evolutionary linked to fuel characteristics evolution and it can include other neutron absorbing materials commonly used in the nuclear industry as borated stainless steel (BSS). The purpose of this paper is to present these experiences, and furthermore to underline our know-how and ability to provide highly efficient interim storage systems. (author)