Establishment of criticality limit curve for PWR spent fuel loading into KDC-1 disposal canister

Technology related to a deep geological disposal as a long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategy has been under development at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) since 1997. The main purpose of this program is to establish a Korean reference HLW repository system by the end of 2006. As a preliminary result, a disposal system design including a canister and disposal hole was proposed through thermal and mechanical analyses. The proposed canister, however, still has the potential to be modified, if one of the safety criteria can't be satisfied. For a safe storage of spent nuclear fuel the requirement concerning a normal criticality safety described in 10CFR60.131(h), as one of the criteria, should be met. Therefore, the criticality limit curve satisfying the criticality safety limit was established to ascertain how many spent fuels can be loaded into the proposed canister by considering the domestic spent PWR nuclear fuels and disposal system developed up to now. From this result, it was eventually ascertained whether the proposed canister design, KDC-1[1], is reasonable or not