Research Status of Spent Fuel Transport Containers

The development of nuclear energy will play an important role in the implementation of China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutral strategy. Since China’s first nuclear power plant came into commercial operation, nuclear power generation has reached a total of more than 2.6 trillion kilowatt hours, equivalent to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions of about 2.1 billion tons. With more nuclear power units coming into operation, the production of spent fuel has also increased exponentially, and spent fuel transportation and off-stack storage have become the most urgent aspects of the back-end of China’s nuclear fuel cycle. The need for large spent fuel transport containers is becoming increasingly urgent as the spent fuel pools in China are becoming full and spent fuel cooled to a certain age needs to be transported to the final disposal site in spent fuel transport containers. The paper investigates the current research status of spent fuel transport containers from three aspects: design and manufacture, test capability and numerical simulation analysis, and gives reasonable suggestions for the development of large spent fuel transport containers in China.