A History of Standardized, Multipurpose Canister System

This presentation was presented at the WM2015 presentation in Phoenix, AZ on March 17, 2015.

Since the early 1980s, the federal government and individual utilities have put forth considerable effort to develop a canister for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) that could be used as part of a dry storage system, transportation system, and disposal system without having to be reopened. While the terminology for this type of canister has changed over the years, the underlying concept and purpose have not. These efforts and ongoing activities in this area are highlighted, expanding upon several previous works.

During development of dry storage systems in the 1980s, there was growing interest in triple-purpose (storage, transportation, and disposal) canister concepts, and preliminary studies were conducted. That interest evolved into a project to develop a multipurpose canister (MPC) in the 1990s. After the defunding of that project, the concept lived on in a canister system for US Department of Energy (DOE) owned fuel from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. The commercial spent fuel version of the concept resurfaced in the mid-2000s as the transportation, aging and disposal (TAD) canister [2, 9, 10]. After the halting of the TAD canister project, the specific implementation of triple-purpose canisters was re-evaluated. This re-evaluation resulted in the standardized transportation, aging, and disposal (STAD) canister conceptual design and evaluation effort . Each of these efforts is reviewed and summarized.