This “Technical Evaluation Report on the Content of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain License Application; Postclosure Volume: Repository Safety After Permanent Closure” (TER Postclosure Volume) presents information on the NRC staff’s review of DOE’s Safety Analysis Report (SAR), provided on June 3, 2008, as updated by DOE on February 19, 2009. The NRC staff also reviewed information DOE provided in response to NRC staff’s requests for additional information and other information that DOE provided related to the SAR.

Presented at the NEI Used Fuel Management Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, May 7-9, 2013

NRC/NEI, January 24, 2014 Public Meeting Presentations

Presented at the NEI Used Fuel Management Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, May 7-9, 2013

NRC Waste Confidence Rulemaking, Federal Register, 1984, 1990, 1999, and 2008

This report proposes and documents a computational benchmark for the estimation of the
additional reactivity margin available in spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from fission products and minor
actinides in a burnup-credit storage/transport environment, relative to SNF compositions
containing only the major actinides. The benchmark problem/configuration is a generic burnupcredit
cask designed to hold 68 boiling water reactor (BWR) spent nuclear fuel assemblies. The
purpose of this computational benchmark is to provide a reference configuration for the

This report has been prepared to support technical discussion of and planning for future
research supporting implementation of burnup credit for boiling-water reactor (BWR) spent fuel
storage in spent fuel pools and storage and transport cask applications. The review and
discussion in this report are based on knowledge and experience gained from work performed
in the United States and other countries, including experience with burnup credit for
pressurized-water reactor (PWR) spent fuel. Relevant physics and analysis phenomena are

This report presents a best-estimate probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) to quantify the frequency of criticality accidents during railroad transportation of spent nuclear fuel casks. The assessment is of sufficient detail to enable full scrutiny of the model logic and the basis for each quantitative parameter contributing to criticality accident scenario frequencies. The report takes into account the results of a 2007 peer review of the initial version of this probabilistic risk assessment, which was published as EPRI Technical Report 1013449 in December 2006.

In the existing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations governing the spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the time period of compliance was set at 10,000 years. Recently, a Court ordered that EPA and NRC either revise the regulation on this topic to be "based upon and consistent with" recommendations made by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, who recommended a time period of compliance out to as long as one million years, or seek congressional relief.

Utilization of burnup credit in criticality safety analysis for long-term disposal of spent
nuclear fuel allows improved design efficiency and reduced cost due to the large mass of fissile
material that will be present in the repository. Burnup-credit calculations are based on depletion
calculations that provide a conservative estimate of spent fuel contents (in terms of criticality
potential), followed by criticality calculations to assess the value of the effective neutron

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.

Presented at the NEI Used Fuel Management Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, May 7-9, 2013

Presented at the NEI Used Fuel Management Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, May 7-9, 2013

This paper presents an evaluation of the amount of burnup credit needed for high-density casks to
transport the current U.S. inventory of commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies. A prototypic
32-assembly cask and the current regulatory guidance were used as bases for this evaluation.
By comparing actual pressurized-water-reactor (PWR) discharge data (i.e., fuel burnup and initial
enrichment specifications for fuel assemblies discharged from U.S. PWRs) with actinide-only-based

As part of the plutonium waste form development and down-select process, repository analyses have been conducted to evaluate the long-term performance of these forms for repository acceptance. Intact and degraded mode criticality analysis of mixed oxide (MOX) spent fuel is presented in Volume I, while Volume II presents the evaluations of the waste form containing plutonium immobilized in a ceramic matrix.

These slides were presented by Waste Control Specialists LLC (WCS) to the NRC at the June 16, 2015 pre-application public meeting at the NRC offices in Rockville, Maryland.

This Interim Staff Guidance (ISG) provides guidance to the staff for determining if
storage systems to be licensed under 10 CFR Part 72 allow ready retrieval of spent fuel.
This guidance is not a regulation or a requirement.

This Interim Staff Guidance (ISG) provides guidance to the staff on classifying spent nuclear
fuel as either (1) damaged, (2) undamaged, or (3) intact, before interim storage or
transportation. This is not a regulation or requirement and can be modified or superseded by
an applicant with supportable technical arguments.

Revision 2

Compliance with 10 CFR 72.122(l) has been interpreted to mean that a licensee, during any
point in the storage cycle, must have a means of retrieving and repackaging individual fuel
assemblies even after an accident. The staff has reevaluated this interpretation.

The closure weld for the outer cover plate for austenitic stainless steel designs may be
inspected using either volumetric or multiple pass dye penetrant techniques subject to the
following conditions:
• Dye penetrant (PT) examination may only be used in lieu of volumetric
examination only on austenitic stainless steels. PT examination should be done
in accordance with ASME Section V, Article 6, “Liquid Penetrant Examination.”
• For either ultrasonic examination (UT) or PT examination, the minimum

Several changes have occurred since the issuance of NUREG-1536, “Standard Review Plan
(SRP) for Dry Cask Storage Systems,” that affect the staff’s approach to confinement
evaluation. The attachment to this ISG integrates the current staff approach into a revision of
ISG-5. The highlights of the changes include:
• Reflects October 1998 revisions to 10 CFR 72.104 and 10 CFR 72.106.
• Expands and clarifies acceptance criteria associated with confinement analysis and
acceptance of “leak tight” testing instead of detailed confinement analysis.