Dear Mr. President:
At your direction, the Secretary of Energy established the Blue Ribbon Commission on
America’s Nuclear Future to review policies for managing the back end of the nuclear
fuel cycle and recommend a new strategy. We are pleased to be serving as Co‐
Chairmen of the Commission, and we are writing to you to highlight an important action
we strongly believe should be reflected in your Fiscal Year 2013 baseline budget
projections.
In our draft report to the Secretary, issued in July of this year, the Commission

America’s nuclear waste management program is at an impasse. The Obama Administration’s decision
to halt work on a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is but the latest indicator of a policy that has
been troubled for decades and has now all but completely broken down. The approach laid out under
the 1987 Amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA)—which tied the entire U.S. high-level
waste management program to the fate of the Yucca Mountain site—has not worked to produce a

The purpose of this activity is to develop a representative “limiting” axial burnup profile for pressurized water reactors (PWRs), which would encompass the isotopic axial variations caused by different assembly irradiation histories, and produce conservative isotopics with respect to criticality. The effect that the low burnup regions near the ends of spent fuel have on system reactivity is termed the “end-effect”. This calculation will quantify the end-effects associated with Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel assemblies emplaced in a hypothetical 21 PWR waste package.

The Reactor and Fuel Cycle Technology Subcommittee was formed to respond to the charge—set forth in the charter of the BRC—to evaluate existing fuel cycle technologies and R&D programs in terms of multiple criteria.

The purpose of this calculation is to develop axial profiles for estimating the axial variation in burnup of a boiling water reactor (BWR) assembly spent nuclear fuel (SNF) given the average burnup of an assembly. A discharged fuel assembly typically exhibits higher burnup in the center and lower burnup at the ends of the assembly. Criticality safety analyses taking credit for SNF burnup must account for axially varying burnup relative to calculations based on uniformly distributed assembly average burnup due to the under-burned tips.

Dear Representatives Upton and Shimkus,
At the direction of the President, the Secretary of Energy established the Blue Ribbon
Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and charged it with reviewing policies for
managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. We are serving as the Co-Chairmen of
the Commission and have taken note of your recent comments about the Commission’s
work.
Your comments echo those we have heard from several members of Congress and from
people across the country who believe the United States should not abandon the

Dear Co-Chairs Hamilton and Scowcroft:
The Obama Administration believes that nuclear energy has an important role to playas America moves to a clean energy future. One of my goals as Secretary of Energy is to help restart America's nuclear industry, creating thousands of new jobs and new export opportunities for the United States while producing the carbon free energy we need to power America's economy.

Dear Secretary Chu:
At the direction of the President, you charged the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s
Nuclear Future with reviewing policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel
cycle and recommending a new plan. We thank you for choosing us to serve as Co-
Chairmen of the Commission and for selecting the talented and dedicated set of
Commissioners with whom we serve.
We have sought to ensure that our review is comprehensive, open and inclusive. The
Commission and its subcommittees have heard from hundreds of individuals and

This paper, prepared to aid the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future in its
deliberations, includes a discussion of the issues that would be faced in the siting, permitting and
licensing of storage and disposal facilities for the “back end” of the commercial nuclear fuel
cycle and for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) high–level radioactive waste. It discusses the
authority that could be employed by non–federal levels of government in supporting or opposing

This report highlights the findings and conclusions of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) and presents recommendations for consideration by the Administration and Congress, as well as interested state, tribal and local governments, other stakeholders, and the public.

The purpose of this activity is to develop a representative “limiting” axial burnup profile for pressurized water reactors (PWRs), which would encompass the isotopic axial variations caused by different assembly irradiation histories, and produce conservative isotopics with respect to

This calculation compares results from criticality evaluations for a 21-assembly pressurized water reactor (PWR) waste package based on 12 axial burnup profile representations for commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies. The burnup profiles encompass the axial variations caused by different fuel assembly irradiation histories in a commercial PWR, including end effects, and the concomitant effect on reactivity in the waste package. The bounding axial burnup profiles in Table T of reference 6.3 are used for this analysis.

In 1999, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC) initiated a research program
to support the development of technical bases and guidance that would facilitate the implementation of burnup
credit into licensing activities for transport and dry cask storage. This paper reviews the following major areas of
investigation: (1) specification of axial burnup profiles, (2) assumption on cooling time, (3) allowance for
assemblies with fixed and removable neutron absorbers, (4) the need for a burnup margin for fuel with initial