FCC-NG: The AREVA Safe Fresh Fuel Shipping Cask to Deliver the Future EPR™ Reactors

AREVA as a worldwide PWR fuel provider has to have a fleet of fresh UO₂ shipping casks being agreed within a lot of countries and to accommodate foreseen EPR™ Nuclear Power Plants fuel buildings. To reach this target the AREVA NP Fuel Sector together with TN International (a subsidiary of AREVA NC) decided to develop an up to date shipping cask gathering experience feedback of the today fleet and an improved safety allowing the design to comply with international regulations (NRC and IAEA) and other local foreign Safety Authorities requirements. Based on pre design features a safety case was set up to highlight safety margins. Criticality hypothetical accidental assumptions were defined: • Preferential flooding, • Fuel rod array expansion (so called “bird caging” effect), • Fuel sliding, • Neutron absorber penalty, • …. The French criticality code package CRISTAL is used to check several configurations reactivity and derived safety margins. The CRISTAL code package relies on a wide validation process helping defining uncertainties as required by regulations in force. The shipping cask, containing two fuel assemblies, is designed to maximize fuel isolation inside the cask and with neighboring ones even for large array configuration cases. Few and proven industrial products are used: • Stainless steel for the structural frame, • Balsa wood for impact limiters, • BORA^® resin as neutron absorber. The cask is designed to handle mainly the EPR™ fuel assembly type and may be extended to other contents such as APWR fuel assembly type. After a brief presentation of the computer codes and the description of the shipping cask, the CRISTAL calculation results as well as the applied uncertainties will be discussed.