Spent Nuclear Fuel Structural Response when Subject to an End Impact Accident

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) is tasked with licensing safe spent fuel storage and transportation systems. A subset of this responsibility is to investigate and understand the structural performance of these systems. In a joint effort between staff at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the USNRC, computational studies were performed to predict the structural response of spent nuclear fuel when subject to an end impact accident. In this study the structural performance of a typical pressurized water reactor fuel assembly is evaluated using the ANSYS® /LS-DYNA® finite element analysis code.Copyright © 2004 by ASME