Prediction of Cladding Temperatures Within a Used Nuclear Fuel Transfer Cask Filled With Rarefied Helium

During the used nuclear fuel vacuum drying process, helium is evacuated to pressures as low as 70 Pa, to promote water vaporization and removal. At these low pressures the gas is rarefied to the extent that there is a temperature jump thermal resistance between the surface and gas. This occurs when the mean free path of a molecule becomes a comparable to the characteristic length of a system. In order to correctly apply this jump model to a nuclear transfer cask, a two dimensional model of parallel plates and concentric cylinders were created using ANSYS/Fluent package. Heat generation was plotted against a variety of relevant pressures. The results in these simple geometries are compared to kinetic model calculations, performed by other investigators, to determine the appropriate collision diameters to use in rarefied helium gas simulations within complex geometries. A two dimensional mesh of a transfer cask containing 24 pressurized water reactor used fuel assemblies is then constructed, and the rarefied gas model was implemented in the helium-filled regions between the fuel and basket support structures. Steady state simulations with a fuel heat generation rate of 710 W/m/assemble shows that the cladding is measurably hotter when the helium gas pressure is reduced from atmospheric conditions ∼10⁵ Pa to 500 Pa. The heat generation rate that brings the peak cladding temperature to a hydride dissolution temperature of 400°C is as much as 10% lower when the gas is at 500 Pa than under atmospheric conditions.