Design and performance evaluation of legal weight truck tractor and prototype semitrailer for the highway transport of spent nuclear fuel

The US Department of Energy (DOE), through the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM), has sponsored the development of a Legal Weight Truck (LWT) tractor and specially-designed semitrailer transport system (LWT System). The LWT System is comprised of a commercial production cab-over-engine (COE) truck tractor produced by Freightliner, Inc. and a lightweight semitrailer designed by General Atomics (GA) and fabricated by General Trailer. The LWT System is intended to support the requirement for highway transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) loaded into the General Atomics 9-assembly transport cask (GA-9). The LWT System is required to weigh less than 26,000 pounds to satisfy the legal weight status requirement while transporting the 54,000 pound (loaded) GA-9 cask. The semitrailer is designed and maintained in accordance with ANSI N14.30 Semitrailers Employed in the Highway Transport of Weight-Concentrated Radioactive Loads: Design, Fabrication, and Maintenance. Semitrailer design is also in accordance with the weld sizes and stresses permitted by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Manual of Steel Construction