Spent-fuel heatup following loss of water in a spent-fuel pool

The spent-fuel storage pools in light water reactors were originally designed to accommodate the amount of spent fuel expected to be awaiting shipment to a reprocessing facility. With the current U.S. moratorium on spent-fuel reprocessing and the absence of either a permanent geologic high-level waste repository or an interim monitored retrievable storage facility, utilities had few alternatives but to store spent fuel at the reactor site. This has resulted in increasingly large inventories of spent fuel being stored in reactor spent-fuel pools. An interim solution to the increased inventories has been a modification of spent-fuel storage racks to further increase the ultimate capacities of reactor fuel pools. A methodology for predicting spent-fuel heat up in the event of loss of water during storage has been formulated and implemented in a computer code called SHARP at Brookhaven National Laboratory.