Recently, high-rise residential buildings in Korea have adopted slender shear walls with irregular section shapes, such as T-shape, H-shape, and C-shape. In the seismic design of the slender shear walls, the transverse reinforcement for lateral confinement should be provided in the boundary elements to increase deformation capacity and subsequent ductility. However, in practice, the irregularity of the shear walls is not adequately considered, and the lateral confinement region is calculated for the rectangular wall segments. This study investigated the proper design method for lateral confinement regions using finite element analysis. The lateral confinement region was considered in analysis for two cases: 1) as a typical rectangular wall segment and 2) as an irregular wall. When the irregularity of the walls was considered, the compression zone depth was increased because the vertical reinforcement in the flange was addressed. The effect of lateral confinement design methods on the structural performance of the walls was directly compared under various design parameters, including the length of the flange, concrete compressive strength, vertical rebar layout, axial load ratio, and loading direction. According to the results of the parametric analysis, the peak strength and deformation capacity could be significantly increased when the lateral confinement region was calculated based on irregularly shaped walls, regardless of the design parameters. In addition, the effective compression zone was located within the lateral confinement region. Thus, it is recommended that the lateral confinement region of T-shaped walls is calculated by addressing the irregularity of the walls.

Since the time to consider when evaluating leakage of spent fuel dry storage systems is very long, assumptions that continue to leak at the initial leakage rate are too conservative. Therefore, this study developed a dynamic methodology to calculate the change in leakage rate using time-varying variables and apply it to calculate the amount of radioactive leakage during the evaluation period. The developed dynamic methodology was then applied to calculate the leakage radiation source term for a hypothetical dry storage system and used to perform a public dose assessment. When applying the developed dynamic leakage rate evaluation methodology for more accurate confinement evaluation in case of containment damage of dry storage system, it was found that the change of leak rate with time is very insignificant if the hole diameter is small enough, and the leak rate decreases rapidly with time when a hole with a certain diameter or larger occurs. In the case of the accident condition, except when the hole is very large, it corresponds to the chocked flow condition, and the leak rate decreases rapidly as soon as the internal pressure is sufficiently lowered to enter the molecular and continuum flow region. In the case of a small hole diameter, the leakage volume is very small, so even if the dynamic methodology is applied, the evaluation results are not different from the case where the initial leakage rate continues, and when the hole diameter exceeds a certain value, the internal pressure drops according to the leakage volume, and the leakage rate decreases significantly. As a result of evaluating the dose to residents by applying the calculated radiation source term, it was confirmed that the dose criteria was exceeded when a hole with a diameter of about 4 μm occurred under off-normal conditions, and the dose standard was exceeded under accident conditions when a chocked flow occurred between the diameter of the hole and 2-3 μm, resulting in a rapid increase in the dose. The results of this study are expected to contribute to a more accurate evaluation of the confinement performance of storage systems, which will contribute to the design of optimal dry storage systems.

In order to construct and operate the dry storage systems, it is essential to confirm the safety of the systems through safety analysis. If the dry storage cask is damaged due to an accident, a large amount of radioactive material may be leaked to the outside and cause radiation exposure to surrounding workers and nearby public, so the effect thereof should be evaluated. Many input parameter are required in the confinement evaluation for accident condition, and in this study, the change in the confinement evaluation result according to the change of major input parameter is to be studied. In this study, we selected fractions of radioactive materials available for release from spent fuel, cooling time, and distance to exclusive area boundary as the major input parameter. In general, the release fraction suggested by NUREG-1536 has been used, but NUREG-2224 provides the fraction for high burn-up spent fuel in fire and impact accident conditions, unlike NUREG-1536 which provide a single value. In the case of the distance to exclusive area boundary, 100 to 800 m was considered, and in the case of the cooling time, 10 to 50 years was considered in this study. In order to compare the dose change by the parameter, we set up the hypothetical storage system. A storage cask of the system contain 21 PWR spent fuel assemblies with an initial enrichment of 4.5wt%, burnup of 45,000 MWD/MTU. During the accident condition, it is assumed that the cask is leaked at 1.0×10−7cm3·sec−1. Since the main dose criterion for accident conditions is 50 mSv of effective dose, effective doses are calculated in this study. In an accident condition, transuranic particulate contribute most of the doses, so the doses are determined according to the fraction for the particulate. Therefore, it was confirmed that the dose was almost the same as the fraction for the accident conditions in NUREG-1536 and the fraction for the impact accident conditions in NUREG-2224 is 3×10−5, but the dose was also 100 times higher as the fraction for the fire accident conditions in NUREG-2224 is 3×10−3. In the case of the cooling time, it was confirmed that the dose change according to the cooling time was not significant because the dose contribution of transuranic elements having very long half-life was very large. In the case of the distance, it was confirmed that the dose decreased exponentially as the atmospheric dispersion factor decreased exponentially with the distance.