Rapid Analytic Determination of Dry Cask Storage Canister Internal Temperatures

In the absence of a permanent disposition pathway, the service lifetimes of spent fuel dry cask storage systems (DCS) will likely be longer than originally intended [1]. Due to the still-radioactive nature of the spent fuel, a breach of containment, and the subsequent environmental remediation, would pose a serious hazard to public health. As most canister degradation mechanisms are temperature-dependent, it is essential to develop tools and methods to identify canisters at risk of breach due to prolonged thermal exposure [1].There is currently no expedient method to physically monitor the thermal environment within the DCS. Consequently, a number of studies have modeled temperature profiles of a given DCS configuration with a unique fuel loading exposed to a singular environmental condition using commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software [2, 3, 4]. Given the large number of individual storage modules, each with a unique fuel activity, the need to predict realistic temperature profiles as a function of time cannot be met through use of CFD modeling due to the computational expense. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that a low-fidelity, yet robust analytic model can accurately determine these temperate distributions.