Assessment of the Long-Term Storage of PT-SCWR Fuel Bundle in CANDU Deep Geological Repository

Abstract

The Canadian strategy for the long-term management of spent fuel is to store the spend fuel in Deep Geological Repository (DGR) with the ability to retrieve the spent fuel if it is needed afterwards. In this work, the ability to store typical Pu-Th fuel bundles from PT-SCWR in the CANDU DGR has been assessed. It has been found, SCWR fuel needs twice the size of CANDU DGR. This is due to higher decay heat of Pu-Th cycle. This has to be kept in mind during the development of SCWR concepts as it will increase the cost of fuel life-cycle.

The same canister used for EPR has been used for SCWR, the criticality safety of such canister after years of cooling have been checked. It is found that the infinite multiplication factor is very low and so, the criticality is not an issue for SCWR fuel bundle.