it would come directly under the protection of plant’s guard forces. The protected area is surrounded by vehicle barriers to protect against the detonation of a design basis threat vehicle bomb.12
A terrorist attack that breached a dry cask could potentially result in the release of radioactive material from the spent fuel into the environment through one or both of the following two processes: (1) mechanical dispersion of fuel particles or fragments; and (2) dispersion of radioactive aerosols (e.g., cesium-137). As described in Chapter 3, the latter process would have greater offsite radiological consequences. The committee evaluates the potential for both of these processes later in this chapter.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, additional work has been or is being carried out by government and private entities to assess the security risks to dry casks from terrorist attacks. Sandia National Laboratories is currently analyzing the response of dry casks to a number of potential terrorist attack scenarios at the request of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The committee was briefed on these analyses at two of its meetings.
Sandia is analyzing the responses of three vertical cask designs and one horizontal design to a variety of terrorist attack scenarios (FIGURE 4.3). These designs are considered to be broadly representative of the dry casks currently licensed for storage in the United States by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (see TABLE 4.1 at the end of this chapter). The committee received briefings on these studies by Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Sandia staff.
Several attack scenarios are being considered in the Sandia analyses. They include large aircraft impacts and assaults with various types and sizes of explosive charges and other energetic devices. Details on the large aircraft impact scenarios are provided in the classified report.
Most of this work is still in progress and has not yet resulted in reviewable documents. Consequently, the committee had to rely on discussions with the experts who are carrying out these studies and its own expert judgment in assessing the quality and completeness of this work.
4.2.1 Large Aircraft Impacts
Sandia analyzed the impact of an airliner traveling at high speed into the four cask designs shown in FIGURE 4.3. These analyses examined the consequences of impacts of the fuselage and the “hard” components of the aircraft (i.e., the engines and wheel struts) into individual casks and arrays of casks on a storage pad. The latter analysis examined the potential consequences of cask-to-cask interactions resulting from cask sliding or partial tip-over The objectives of the analyses were first to determine whether the casks would fail (i.e., the containment would be breached) and, if so, to estimate the radioactive material releases and their health consequences.
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12 |
As noted in Chapter 2, the committee did not examine surveillance requirements or the placement or effectiveness of vehicle barriers and guard stations at commercial nuclear plants. |
FIGURE 4.3 Four cask systems used in the Sandia analyses described in this chapter: (A) HI-STORM-100, (B) TN-68, (C) VSC-24, (D) NUHOMS-32P. The casks shown in A, C, and D are canister-based casks; the cask shown in B is a bare-fuel cask. SOURCE: Nuclear Regulatory Commission briefing materials (2004).
The aircraft was modeled using Sandia-developed Eulerian CTH code (see footnote 15 in Chapter 3). The aircraft manufacturer (Boeing Corp.) was consulted to ensure that the aircraft model used in the analyses was accurate. The casks were modeled with standard finite element codes using the published characteristics of the casks. The casks were assumed to be filled with high-burn-up, 10-year-old spent fuel. The fuel rods were assumed to fail (rupture) if the strains in the cladding exceeded 1 percent, which is a conservative assumption. Sandia evaluated the release of radioactive materials from the spent fuel pellets inside the fuel rods when such cladding failures occurred. Radiological consequences of such releases were calculated for “representative” (with respect to weather and population) site conditions for each cask based on the actual average conditions at the
