CFD simulation of air ventilated spent fuel cask design for PWR fuel assemblies

Dry storage casks are standalone containers that can be used to store spent nuclear fuel for an extended period of time. This paper is about the modeling and simulation of air ventilated dry storage cask used for long term storage of spent fuel assemblies from pressurized water reactors. A two-dimensional axis-symmetric model is generated for the actual cask geometry in order to simulate the thermal hydraulic behavior of the cask. The effects of natural circulation along with conjugate heat transfer have been taken into account within the numerical modeling scheme. Result obtained from the generated model is verified through comparison with data available in the literature. The model is then utilized to predict the cask response when loaded with spent fuel assemblies from Chashma nuclear power plant located in Pakistan.