The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to evaluate the ability of certified Spent Nuclear Fuel packages to withstand the conditions of specific severe, long-duration fire accidents. The study chose to focus on the conditions in real tunnel fires using a fire dynamic simulator program (FDS):
(1) The 8,800 gallons of gasoline in the Caldecott roadway tunnel in 1982
(2) The 28,600 gallons of tripropylene in the Howard Street tunnel in 2001
The authors of this article looked to compare the FDS program to their container analysis fire environment (CAFE) code using the data from a series of fire tests within the abandoned Memorial tunnel in West Virginia. They find that the temperature prediction accuracy of their CAFE code is similar to FDS.