In October 2009, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (Board or NWTRB) published Survey of National Programs for Managing High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel.  For each of the 13 national programs studied, the report catalogued 15 institutional arrangements that had been set in place and 15 technical approaches that had been taken to design repository systems for the long-term management of high-activity radioactive waste.

Presentation slides on the Consolidated Interim Storage Facility Reference Design Concept, including site plans; handling, inspection and repackaging concepts and facilities; and cost and staffing estimates. 

The question of whether centralized storage of civilian spent nuclear fuel (SNF) should be part of the federal waste management system as an intermediate step before permanent disposal has been debated for more than four decades. Centralized storage facilities were included as a potential component of the U.S. spent fuel management system in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), but the NWPA did not identify these facilities as being essential.

There has been, for decades, a worldwide consensus in the nuclear technical community for disposal through geological isolation of high-level waste (HLW), including spent nuclear fuel (SNF).  However, none of the national programs established to implement geological disposal has yet succeeded in establishing a geological repository and emplacing HLW in it. The large and growing HLW inventory from civilian and military reactor use over nearly 60 years remains in surface facilities intended only for interim storage.