A Limited-Scope Probabilistic Risk Assessment Model for the Transportation of Fission Batteries
AUTHORS
DaeHo Lee,Department of Nuclear Engineering, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States
Mihai Diaconeasa,Department of Nuclear Engineering, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States
ABSTRACT
Advanced reactor designs are currently in the spotlight as future nuclear energy source amid the climate change challenges. A worldwide effort is currently underway toward the scaling back in size the large nuclear power plant designs to reduce the capital cost. In this trend, the idea of a fission battery emerged. The fission battery initiative established by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is envisioning to enable the installed deployment of nuclear energy to unlicensed users with the concept of “plug-and-play” without operations and maintenance staff alike the use of chemical batteries. Safe transportation is one of the key challenges for fission batteries that would have to be fully assembled at the manufacturing factories, deployed to users, and decommissioned. To this end, this study was conducted to evaluate the safety of fission battery transportation using Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) techniques. PRA is a comprehensive methodology to evaluate the safety of complex systems by answering three questions: what can go wrong, how likely it is to go wrong, and if it does go wrong, what are the consequences. To quantify the likelihood of what can go wrong, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Radioactive Material Transport (NRC-RADTRAN) computer code was used to evaluate scenarios with end states, such as incident free transportation, loss of shielding accident without and with the release of radioactive materials. To determine the fission products inventories of fission batteries for various design and operational configurations, the Oak Ridge Isotope Generation (ORIGEN) computer code was used assuming 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year of operation with 100% power operation at 10 MWth and 20 MWth. To showcase the approach, we developed a scenario involving the transportation by rail of one fission battery right after shutdown through urban areas from Maine Yankee to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) site. The results of our study revealed that the individual dose during incident free transportation was at a maximum of 5.36E-04 mrem, which is significantly smaller than 10 mrem of radiation dose from a chest X-ray. Also, the maximum dose rate at 2 meters to an emergency responder during loss of shielding accidents were between 42.9 mrem/h and 717 mrem/h, under the regulatory dose rate of 1000 mrem/h under the hypothetical accident condition. Finally, the individual dose risk to the public resulted from release of radioactive materials following loss of shielding accidents were between 1.30E-13 rem and 1.70E-14 rem. For additional insights, a discussion is provided to compare the risk of fission battery transportation with the risk of spent nuclear fuel transportation from current light water reactors assuming the same packaging design requirements. Under these assumptions, we demonstrated that fission battery transportation is as safe as the current spent nuclear fuel transportation. The significance of this study is the transportation of fission batteries can be achieved with existing technology safely, at cost, and on time, which are needed to enable the upcoming energy transformation.
KEYWORDS
Fission battery, Probabilistic risk assessment, Transportation
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