Months of testing in 2017 provided strong evidence that spent nuclear fuel can be safely transported by sea, road, and rail, according to a researcher with the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories.
A team of researchers from the United States, South Korea, and Spain over 54 days from June to October collected 8 terabytes of data involving four means of transport, 9,458 miles, seven countries, and 12 U.S. states. Their work moved three “surrogate” spent fuel assemblies in a dual-purpose cask from Santander, Spain, to Pueblo, Colo.
The testing involved: using cranes to lift the cask, dropping it to a concrete pad with different levels of force; trucking it around northern Spain; sailing it from Spain to Belgium and then across the Atlantic Ocean from Belgium to Baltimore, sometimes over 20-foot swells; rolling it 2,000 miles by rail to Pueblo, then conducting eight days of rail testing at the Transportation Technology Center; and then another rail trip back to Baltimore.
Instruments applied during all modes of testing indicated the strain and acceleration on the fuel assemblies were well within safety limits, according to Sylvia Saltzstein, manager of Sandia’s used nuclear fuel transportation and storage department.
“This data will be used to provide the technical basis for asserting that there is inherent safety in transporting spent fuel under normal conditions of transport,” Saltzstein said last month during a presentation at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s Used Fuel Management Conference in Savannah, Ga.
Testing in the current 2018 federal budget year will include frequency transmission, instantaneous versus gross loading, system behavior, and other areas, according to Saltzstein.
The United States has upward of 80,000 metric tons of used fuel at nuclear power reactors that the Department of Energy is legally mandated to move into permanent disposal. That will require the kind of transport the three-nation team of researchers has been testing – possibly repeatedly, if the waste is moved into interim storage and then later into final disposal.