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.

The characteristics of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste are described, and options for permanent disposal that have been considered are described. These include:
•disposal in a mined geological formation,
•disposal in a multinational repository, perhaps on an unoccupied island,
•by in situ melting, perhaps in underground nuclear test cavities,
•sub-seabed disposal,
•disposal in deep boreholes,
•disposal by melting through ice sheets or permafrost,
•disposal by sending the wastes into space, and