Proposal for the rocking analysis model of the dry cask for spent nuclear fuel attached to the storage pallet subjected to the strong earthquake motions

Abstract

In Japan, a dry cask for spent nuclear fuel attached to a storage pallet should be transferred and stored in the vertical orientation on the concrete floor in an interim spent nuclear fuel storage facility at or outside reactor site, and a transfer system using air supply will be adopted for such pallet. In case of the hypothetical event, the shutdown of the air supply due to the strong earthquake motions, it is important to evaluate a stability of the metal cask on the concrete floor during seismic motions. A dynamic analysis by the analysis code "TDAPⅢ" was executed with a simple lumped mass model by adopting joint elements between a concrete floor and pallet, to reproduce the rocking and sliding behavior. Joint stiffness values were equivalently set to the vibration modes obtained by an eigenvalue analysis. The seismic analysis results were compared with the previous shaking table test results with 2/5 scale model of a real size cask. As a result, although discrepancies of the velocity response of the converted from maximum uplifting potential energy appeared in the range of μ ± 3σ (0.57～1.46) among 45 analysis cases comparing with experiment results, it was confirmed that maximum value was about 110kine considerably less than the overturning threshold value 190kine. Moreover, an applicability of the proposed prediction methodology to the real size model was also confirmed.

Keywords

• metal cask
• storage pallet
• seismic response analysis
• spring-mass model
• spent fuel interim storage
• dry cask