Nuclear engineering graduate student Remy DeVoe recently won second place in the Used Fuel Disposition category in the Fuel Cycle Innovations Awards (sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy) for a research paper on used nuclear fuel management that he recently presented at a research conference.
The paper, entitled “COBRA-SFS Dry Cask Modeling Sensitivities In High-Capacity Canisters,” details DeVoe’s research into making better thermal hydraulics models of spent nuclear fuel storage canisters. His graduate research is in modeling nuclear fuel storage systems and frequently requires using his engineering knowledge to make simplifications to the model when data isn’t available or has high uncertainty.
The paper evaluates the impact of assumed modeling parameters on temperature results through a sensitivity study. The main question DeVoe tries to answer is how good are the thermal models currently used to assess the safety of nuclear fuel storage and what areas can see the greatest improvement. His paper shows that the greatest difference in results came from environmental factors like the ambient air temperature around the storage cask.
DeVoe presented this paper at the International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference in Charleston, South Carolina.