Safety assessment of a dry storage container drop into irradiated fuel bays

In Pickering nuclear stations, Dry Storage Containers (DSCs) are employed to transfer used (irradiated) fuel from an irradiated fuel bay to a dry storage facility for interim storage. Each DSC is wet-loaded in the bay water with 4 fuel modules containing up to a total of 384 used fuel bundles that have been out of the reactor core for at least 10 years. Once the DSC is fully loaded, the crane in the bay raises the DSC for spray-wash such that the bottom of the DSC is never more than 2 m above the bay water surface. This paper presents a safety assessment of consequences of an unlikely event that a fully loaded DSC is accidentally dropped into an irradiated fuel bay from the highest possible elevation. Experiments and analyses performed elsewhere show that the DSC drop-generated shock waves will not threaten the structural integrity of an irradiated fuel bay. Therefore, this assessment only assesses the potential damage to the spent fuel bundles in the bay due to pressure transients generated by an accidental DSC drop. A bounding estimate approach has been used to calculate the upper limit of the pressure pulse and the resulting static and dynamic stresses on the fuel sheath. The bounding calculations and relevant experimental results demonstrate that an accidental drop of a fully loaded DSC into an irradiated fuel bay will not cause additional failures of the main fuel inventories stored in modules in the bay water, thus no consequential release of fission products into the bay water. (author)