The U.S. industry’s limited efforts at licensing transportation packages characterized as “highcapacity,”
or containing “high-burnup” (>45 GWd/MTU) commercial spent nuclear fuel
(CSNF), or both, have not been successful considering existing spent-fuel inventories that will
have to be eventually transported. A holistic framework is proposed for resolving several CSNF
transportation issues. The framework considers transportation risks, spent-fuel and cask-design

This report investigates trends in the radiological decay properties and changes in relative nuclide importance associated with increasing enrichments and burnup for spent LWR fuel as they affect the areas of criticality safety, thermal analysis (decay heat), and shielding analysis of spent fuel transport and storage casks. To facilitate identifying the changes in the spent fuel compositions that most directly impact these application areas, the dominant nuclides in each area have been identified and ranked by importance.

This paper provides a brief description of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and its regulatory process for the current nuclear fuel cycle for light water power reactors (LWRs). It focuses on the regulatory framework for the licensing of facilities in the fuel cycle. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the NRC and its regulatory program including a description of its organization, function, authority, and responsibilities.

Burnup credit (BUC) is a concept applied in the criticality safety analysis of spent nuclear fuel
in which credit or partial credit is taken for the reduced reactivity worth of the fuel due to both fissile
depletion and the buildup of actinides and fission products that act as net neutron absorbers.
Typically, a two-step process is applied in BUC analysis: first, depletion calculations are performed
to estimate the isotopic content of spent fuel based on its burnup history; second, three-dimensional