General Heat Transfer Characterization and Empirical Models of Material Storage Temperatures for the Los Alamos Nuclear Materials Storage Facility

The Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Materials Storage Facility (NMSF) is being renovated for long-term storage of canisters designed to hold heat-generating nuclear materials. A fully passive cooling scheme, relying on the transfer of heat by conduction, free convection, and radiation has been proposed as a reliable means of maintaining material at acceptable storage temperatures. The storage concept involves placing radioactive materials, with a net heat-generation rate of 10 W to 20 W, inside a set of nested steel canisters. The canisters are, in placed in holding fixtures and positioned vertically within a steel storage pipe. Several hundred drywells are arranged in a linear array within a large bay and dissipate the waste heat to the surrounding air, thus creating a buoyancy driven airflow pattern that draws cool air into the storage facility and exhausts heated air through an outlet stack. In this study, an experimental apparatus was designed to investigate the thermal characteristics of simulated nuclear materials placed inside two nested steel canisters positioned vertically on an aluminum fixture plate and placed inside a section of steel pipe. The heat-generating nuclear materials were simulated with a solid aluminum cylinder containing .an embedded electrical resistance heater. Calibrated type T thermocouples (accurate to ~ O.1 C) were used to monitor temperatures at 20 different locations within the apparatus. The purposes of this study were to observe the heat dissipation characteristics of the proposed `canister/fixture plate storage configuration, to investigate how the storage system responds to changes in various parameters, and to develop and validate empirical correlations to predict material temperatures under various operating conditions