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Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Public Report (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 16-18

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From page 16...
... 1.3 REPORT ROADMAP The sections that follow in this chapter provide background on storage of spent nuclear fuel, which may be helpful to non-experts in understanding the issues discussed in the following chapters. The other chapters are organized to explicitly address the four charges of the committee's statement of task: • Chapter 2 addresses the last charge to the committee to "explicitly consider the risks of terrorist attacks on these materials and the risk these materials might be used to construct a radiological dispersal device." • Chapter 3 addresses the first charge to the committee to examine the "potential safety and security risks of spent nuclear fuel presently stored in cooling pools at commercial reactor sites." • Chapter 4 addresses the second and third charges to examine the "safety and security advantages, if any, of dry cask storage versus wet pool storage at these reactor sites" and the "potential safety and security advantages, if any, of dry cask storage using various single-, dual-, and multi-purpose cask designs." • Chapter 5 concerns implementation of the recommendations in this report, specifically conceming timing and communication issues.
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From page 17...
... , the fuel is considered spent and is removed from the reactor core. Spent fuel assemblies are highly radioactive.
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From page 18...
... and their short-lived decay products contribute nearly 90 percent of the decay heat from a spent fuel assembly. Longer-lived radionuclides persist in the spent fuel even as the decay heat drops further.
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Key Terms

  • spent fuel
  • zirconium cladding
  • terrorist attacks
  • dry cask
  • cladding fire

  • nuclear fuel
  • cask storage
  • pool storage
  • terrorist attack
  • fuel assemblies

  • security advantages
  • spent nuclear
  • commercial nuclear
  • potential safety
  • fuel assembly

  • decay heat
  • reactor core
  • cask designs
  • reactor sites
  • nuclear reactor

  • explicitly consider
  • radiological dispersal
  • core accident
  • cooling pools
  • storage versus

  • wet pool
  • versus wet
  • fuel rods
  • commercial reactor
  • storage using


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