Radiological effect of cask-drop accident in open-pool spent fuel storage

Abstract

This study investigates the radiological risk that may occur during transport of cobalt device after irradiation in open-pool-type reactor from the reactor core to the cobalt cell. The cobalt transport process depends on using heavy shielded cask of 3500 kg weight under the water surface of the spent fuel storage pool which may cause a load drop accident. The load drop accident in the spent fuel storage pool would result in damage of 48 spent fuel elements (FE) maximally. Conservative evaluation for the amount of fission products release from the damage of the spent FE was considered in this study by assuming that all spent FE was recently stored at the time of accident. Consequently, the resulting radiation dose distribution was calculated around the reactor building depending on the meteorological data of the reactor site. GENII-2 code was used to estimate the individual effective dose distribution around the reactor. The result shows that the receptor who located at 1500 m from the reactor building in the south-east direction will receive the maximum individual effective dose of 0.11 Sv.

Keywords

• Effective dose
• GENII code
• load drop accident
• open-pool reactor
• radioactive release