Spent nuclear fuel storage pool thermal hydraulic analysis

Abstract

Storage methods and requirements for spent nuclear fuel at U.S. commercial light water reactors are reviewed in Section 1. Methods of increasing current at-reactor storage capabilities are also outlined. In Section 2 the development of analytical methods for the thermal-hydraulic analysis of spent fuel pools is chronicled, leading up to a discussion of the GFLOW code which is described in Section 3. In Section 4 the verification of GFLOW by comparison of the code's predictions to experimental data taken inside the fuel storage pool at the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant is presented. The predictions of GFLOW using 72, 224 and 1584 node models of the storage pool are compared to each other and to the experimental data. An example of thermal licensing analysis for Maine Yankee using the GFLOW code is given in Section 5. The GFLOW licensing analysis is compared to previous licensing analysis performed by Yankee Atomic using the RELAP-4 computer code.