The purpose of this calculation is to apply the process described in the TDR-DS0-NU-000001 Rev. 02, Preclosure Criticality Analysis Process Report (Ref. 2.2.25) to aid in establishing design and operational criteria important to criticality safety and to identify potential control parameters and their limits important to the criticality safety of commercial spent nuclear fuel (CSNF) handling operations in the Wet Handling Facility (WHF)

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

The purpose of this calculation is to perform waste-form specific nuclear criticality safety calculations to aid in establishing criticality safety design criteria, and to identify design and process parameters that are potentially important to the criticality safety of Department of Energy (DOE) standardized Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) canisters.

The purpose of this calculation is to apply the process described in the Preclosure Criticality Analysis Process Report (Ref. 2.2.12) to establish the bias for keff calculations performed for commercial nuclear fuels using the MCNP code system. This bias will be used in criticality safety analyses as part of the basis for establishing the upper subcritical limit (USL). This calculation also defines the range of applicability (ROA) for which the bias may be used directly without need to consider additional penalties on the USL.

The means to prevent and control criticality must be addressed as part of the Preclosure Safety Analysis (PCSA) required for compliance with 10 CFR Part 63 [DIRS 180319], where the preclosure period covers the time prior to permanent closure activities. This technical report presents the nuclear criticality safety evaluation that documents the achievement of this objective.

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.

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.

The purpose of this calculation is to establish the relative change in the effective neutron multiplication factor (keff) due to the use of MCNP unique identifiers (ZAIDs) in Nuclear Criticality Calculations for Canister-Based Facilities - DOE SNF (Reference 2.2.1, Attachment 3, MCNP inputs.zip) that are different to the ZAIDs used in the Analysis of Critical Benchmark Experiments and Critical Limit Calculation for DOE SNF (Reference 2.2.5, Table 5-3).

This design calculation updates the previous criticality evaluation for the fuel handling, transfer, and staging operations to be performed in the Dry Transfer Facility (DTF) including the remediation area. The purpose of the calculation is to demonstrate that operations performed in the DTF and RF meet the nuclear criticality safety design criteria specified in the Project Design Criteria (PDC) Document (BSC 2004 [DIRS 171599], Section 4.9.2.2), the nuclear facility safety requirement in Project Requirements Document (Canori and Leitner 2003 [DIRS 166275], p.

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 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.

This design calculation revises and updates the previous criticality evaluation for the canister handling, transfer and staging operations to be performed in the Canister Handling Facility (CHF) documented in BSC (Bechtel SAIC Company) 2004 (DIRS 167614).

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.

The purpose of this calculation is to perform waste-form specific nuclear criticality safety calculations to aid in establishing criticality safety design criteria, and to identify design and process parameters that are potentially important to the criticality safety of the transportation, aging and disposal (TAD) canister-based systems.

The purpose of this calculation is to perform waste-form specific nuclear criticality safety calculations to aid in establishing criticality safety design criteria, and to identify design and process parameters that are potentially important to the criticality safety of the transportation, aging and disposal (TAD) canister-based systems.

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 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

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