Ultrasonic cleaning of fuel assemblies

During fuel transportation, contamination of the transfer cask can lead to radiation dosage. That is radioactive crud becomes detached from the fuel surface and is deposited inside the cask. To avoid this at the Tsuruga Power Station Unit 1, crud was removed from fuel assemblies in advance of fuel transportation work. An ultrasonic cleaning process was adopted for this purpose; ultrasonic methods excel over other methods for this type of cleaning. Our process is also able to clean fuel assemblies without removing the channel box. Since this is the first time that the ultrasonic method was applied to fuel assemblies at the light water reactor in Japan on a large scale, the efficiency and the impact on plant instrumentation of the method were examined by performing preliminary test. Based on these tests, an optimum cleaning procedure was established