We are pleased to report that the Safety Analysis Report (SAR) on HI-STAR 190 was submitted to the USNRC on August 7, 2015. HI-STAR 190 is the intended transportation cask to ship loaded canisters from around the country to Holtec’s planned Consolidated Interim Storage facility in Southeast New Mexico (ELEA). HI-STAR 190 (pictorial rendering shown below) is designed to transport all Holtec MPCs (multi-purpose canisters) including the MPC containing the extra-long fuel used at South Texas Project and the soon to be burned AP-1000 fuel (essentially all spent fuel from western light water reactors (LWRs)). HI-STAR 190’s counterpart to transport used fuel from VVERs, termed HI-STAR 190M, is also in an advanced stage of development by Holtec. HI-STAR 190M will be used to transport Holtec’s multi-purpose canisters known as MPC-31 and MPC-85, which are designed to package used fuel from VVER-1000 and VVER-440 reactors, respectively. HI-STAR 190M will be submitted to Ukraine’s national regulator, State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU), for licensing under IAEA regulations.
The HI-STAR 190 series of transport casks are envisaged to never be immersed in a fuel pool: the casks are designated to be “start clean, stay clean,” thus providing an incontrovertibly absolute protection against transport-borne contamination to the away-from-reactor storage facilities (ELEA in New Mexico and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine).
Expansion of the cask contents in HI-STAR 190 to include all other canisters in use in the United States, including those supplied by BNFL, Vectra, Sierra Nuclear, Areva, and NAC, will be undertaken in the near term, thus making HI-STAR 190 a truly universal transport cask. Other transport cask models thus far licensed by Holtec include the HI-STAR 100 (1998), HI-STAR 60 (2009), HI-STAR 180 (2009), HI-STAR 63 (2010) and HI-STAR 180D (2014).
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