South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction said on 25 March that it was the first Korean company to export a used fuel storage cask to the USA. Doosan Heavy said it had supplied five sets of a vertical concrete cask (VCC) to the Three Mile Island NPP in Pennsylvania under a contract that was signed with the US-based NAC (Nuclear Assurance Corporation) at the end of 2019. An additional contract was signed to also deliver two sets of a transportable storage canister, a key component of the cask, in June.
The casks exported by Doosan weigh more than 100 tons and measure 5.7 metres in height with a diameter of 3.4 metres
“Our business partnership with NAC lays the foundation for us to enter the overseas cask market in full force and opens the door to new opportunities, so that we may significantly upgrade our manufacturing know-how of Korean-type casks. As we also expect to see continued demand in Korea, we plan to aggressively target both the domestic and overseas cask markets,” said Kiyong Na, Doosan Heavy’s Nuclear CEO.
Doosan said it is developing a wide range of casks suitable for the nuclear environment in Korea. After signing the “Agreement on Joint Development of Korean-Type Casks” with NAC in 2015, which included technology transfer, Doosan in 2017 developed the Doosan-DSS21, a Korean-type dry-storage cask that meets the stipulations of Korean Nuclear Safety Act and environmental conditions. Having secured in-house design capabilities, Doosan then developed the DSS24 and DSS32 models, upgraded models with larger storage capacity, and the DPC-24, a cask that can be used for both storage and transporting of used fuel. In 2019, Doosan applied for a design licence to the US NRC to verify the safety of its design, and it expects to receive the licence in June.
