Criticality safety assessment of a TRIGA reactor spent-fuel pool under accident conditions

Additional criticality safety analysis of a pool-type storage for TRIGA spent fuel at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is presented. Previous results have shown that subcriticality is not guaranteed for some postulated accidents (earthquake with subsequent fuel rack disintegration resulting in contact fuel pitch) under the assumption that the fuel rack is loaded with fresh 12 wt% standard fuel. To mitigate this deficiency, a study was done on replacing a certain number of fuel elements in the rack with cadmium-loaded absorber rods. The Monte Carlo computer code MCNP4A with an ENDF/B-V library and detailed three-dimensional geometrical model of the spent-fuel rack was used for this purpose. First, a minimum critical number of fuel elements was determined for contact pitch, and two possible geometries of rack disintegration were considered. Next, it was shown that subcriticality can be ensured when pitch is decreased from a rack design pitch of 8 cm to contact, ifa certain number of fuel elements (8 to 20 our of 70) are replaced by absorber rods, which are uniformly mixed into the lattice. To account for the possibility that random mixing of fuel elements and absorber rods can occur during rack disintegration and result in a supercritical configuration, a probabilistic study was made to sample the probability density functions for random absorber rod lattice loadings. Results of the calculations show that reasonably low probabilities for supercriticality can be achieved (down to 10(-6) persevere earthquake, which would result in rack disintegration and subsequent maximum possible pitch decrease) even in the case where fresh 12 wt% standard TRIGA fuel would be stored in the spent-fuel pool.