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Evaluation of Heat Fluxes in Fire Reference Test Conducted in BAM Propane Gas Fire Test Facility
(2024)
Packages for the transport of intermediate- and high-level radioactive waste are designed to withstand severe accidents. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has established specific mechanical and thermal tests. Packages for the transport of radioactive material must withstand these tests to comply with the Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Materials IAEA [IAEA (2018)]. A fire reference package was developed with the primary objective to demonstrate that the fire meets the regulatory requirements. Another aim is to characterise the boundary conditions of the actual fire as input parameters for thermo-mechanical simulations. A simple method to characterise the boundary conditions of a real steady state fire with a fire reference package is presented. The thermal test mainly consists of a 30 minute fully engulfing 800°C pool fire or an equally severe fire, such as a propane gas fire. The fire reference tests are performed prior to the actual fire test with the real package. The heat fluxes into the package depend substantially on the fire characteristics and the surface temperature of the package. To investigate local and overall heat fluxes over a wide range of surface temperatures in this test facility a fire reference package was designed for repeated use. The fire reference package presented in this paper represents the outer geometry of a small transport container for radioactive material and is used as a device in civil engineering. It is designed as a closed steel sheet cylinder with a wall thickness of 10 mm, a length of 182 mm and a diameter of 102 mm. The package was instrumented with thermocouples and filled with heat resistant insulation material. Open-air fire tests were performed in a BAM propane gas fire test facility with the fire reference package. The measured temperatures are used to determine the changes of heat fluxes into the fire reference package in relation to the package surface temperature. The calculated heat fluxes allow its fitting to express the thermal exposure as simple mathematical boundary condition. Therefore, in a first approach, fire properties such as adiabatic surface temperature (AST) as proposed by Wickström et al. (2007), convection coefficient and emissivity are determined mathematically fitting the heat flux development presented in this paper. The evaluated results provide an initial picture of local fire characteristics of the conducted propane gas fire and are a further development of previous works from Feldkamp et al. (2020). The results can be used in thermal and thermo-mechanical models to simulate the load on the real transport package in fire. The test shows that the examined propane gas fire covers the IAEA-fire over a wide range of surface temperatures with the chosen test stand parameters.
Germany had been transporting spent fuel to the reprocessing plant in Sellafield and La Hague for decades until around 2005. Resulting from the obligation to take back the vitrified high-level waste from reprocessing six CASTOR® HAW28M filled with 168 canisters with radioactive waste in vitrified form were transported from Sellafield to the interim storage facility Biblis in 2020. Rail wagons were used for the transport to the port in Barrow-in-Furness, where they were loaded into a dedicated seagoing vessel, certified as INF Class 3 according to the INF Code. This was the first time that vitrified high level waste with considerable heat load was transported under a German design approval certificate.
BAM was involved in the authority assessment of the conditions for the sea transport. For the first transport BAM required among others, assessment of temperature distribution during transport, logging of temperatures of cargo bays and graphical imaging of temperatures of the bay with the cask in order to ensure compliance with temperature specifications, e.g. maximal neutron absorber and gasket temperatures. Special interest was taken in the identification of possible events exceeding the specified temperatures considering the different philosophies of IMDG code and its supplement INF code regarding temperature control of hatches. Results show compliance with assumed conditions.