Spent Fuel Transport Associated With Other Dangerous Goods in Regular Train Units — Assessment of Hypothetical Explosion Impacts

Abstract

Continental railway transport regulations (RID) do not exclude the transport of spent fuel casks in a regular train unit that also contains wagons with other hazardous materials. In the case of a train accident the release or reactions of those dangerous goods could potentially give significant accidental impacts on to the spent fuel casks. The assessment of fires from inflammable liquids and the explosion impacts from pressurised inflammable gases (like LPG) is well known from other studies which have usually revealed sufficient safety margins to the robust spent fuel cask designs. A new problem to be assessed is the potential impact from a detonation blast wave from explosives transported in the same train unit as a spent fuel cask. BAM is assessing this problem by developing a numerical model to calculate the effect of the dynamic pressure of a external shockwave on the cask construction. The calculation results show that the integrity of a robust monolithic cask with a screwed lid closure system is preserved after the effect of a 21 tonne (equivalent weight of TNT) explosive detonation in the regular transport configuration with a distance of 25 m between the centre of the explosion and the front of the cask.