Year: 1989
Type: report
Abstract: Spent fuel acceptance schedules and the allocation of federal acceptance capacity among commercial nuclear power reactors have important operational and cost consequences for reactor operators. Alternative allocation schemes were investigated to some extent in DOE's MRS Systems Study. The current study supplements these analyses for a class of acceptance schemes in which the acceptance capacity of the federal radioactive waste management system is allocated principally to shutdown commercial power reactors, and extends the scope of analysis to include considerations of at-reactor cask loading rates. The operational consequences of these schemes for power reactors, as measured in terms of quantity of spent fuel storage requirement above storage pool capacities and number of years of pool operations after last discharge, are estimated, as are the associated utility costs. This study does not attempt to examine the inter-utility equity considerations involved in departures from the current oldest-fuel-first (OFF) allocation rule as specified in the Standard Contract for Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and/or High-Level Radioactive Waste.'' In the sense that the alternative allocations are more economically efficient than OFF, however, they approximate the allocations that could result from free exchange of acceptance rights among utilities. Such a process would result in the preservation of inter-utility equity. 13 refs., 9 figs., 9 tabs.
DOI: 10.2172/5280788
Authors: T.W. Wood, A.M. Plummer, D.G. Dippold, S.M. Short
Institution: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Language: English
Subfield: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Funder: U.S. Department of Energy
OpenAlex ID: W127478682