Abstract
Spent fuels discharged from nuclear power plants in Japan are planed to be reprocessed at the nuclear fuel recycle plant under construction at Rokkasho-mura. Since the amount of the spent fuels exceeds that of recycled fuel, the spent fuels have to be properly stored and maintained as recycle fuel resource until the beginning of the reprocessing. For that sake, interim storage installations are being constructed away from the reactor by 2010. The storage dry casks have been practically used as the interim storage in the nuclear power plants. From this reason, the storage system using the storage dry casks is promising as the interim storage installations away from the reactors, which are under discussion. In the interim storage installations, the storage using the dry cask of the storage metal cask with business showings, having the function of transportation is now under discussion. By employing transportation and storage dual-purpose cask, the repack equipments can be exhausted, and the reliability of the interim storage installation can be increased. Hitachi, Ltd. has been developing the high reliable and economical transportation and storage dry metal cask. In this report, the outline of our developing transportation and storage dry cask is described. In addition, the results of the fundamental tests and the drop test of a 1/3 scale mocked-up model are demonstrated.
