HEAT TRANSFER OF CANDU FUEL BUNDLES AFTER A LOSS OF COOLANT ACCIDENT IN AN IRRADIATED FUEL BAY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discharged CANDU fuel is stored under water in irradiated fuel bays (IFBs) to remove their decay heat. If the fuel is exposed to air, a self-sustaining reaction could result when the Zircaloy-4 sheathing reaches temperatures sufficient for a breakaway oxidation. To predict when the transition occurs, a 2-D fuel bundle cross-section model in air was developed using the COMSOL Multiphysics ® platform. Breakaway was predicted to occur at its earliest within 2.6 hours for a range of recently discharged bundle powers. It was concluded due to the time required for heat up and cracking of the oxide layer, sufficient margin exists for operators to intervene before a passively cooled, isolated bundle undergoes breakaway. To examine the effect of multiple bundles, a 3-D model based on a quarter of a stand-alone spent fuel rack was developed to calculate the steady-state temperature and mass fluxes of air. The model provided a lower bound for the ambient temperatures because the flow resistance of the bundle was not considered. The correct incorporation of flow resistance is a necessary step before conclusions could be made about the safety of IFBs. However, the analysis using a Computational Fluid Dynamics model for a 0.5 MW fuel rack, indicated that the maximum temperature of the air within the rack was 642 K and located at the centre of the outlet. This result is encouraging to support the safety of IFBs, as the temperature is well below the 873 K, which is approximately the minimum required for a breakaway reaction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".