Criticality safety studies for safe disposal of research reactor spent fuel

A possibility to calculate criticality parameters of certain non-reactor configurations similar to a reactor lattice, for example irradiated fuel storage facilities, by using computer codes and nuclear data libraries which are normally used for calculating reactor core parameters, is studied. The use of methods and computational schemes generally applied for reactor core design and incore fuel management purposes, to perform nuclear criticality studies of spent fuel storage options, may have certain advantages in comparison to the use of sophisticated nuclear criticality safety codes which have not been validated earlier for treating systems with the fuel compositions and configurations considered.