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

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.

To establish a new organization to manage nuclear waste, provide a consensual process for siting nuclear waste facilities, ensure adequate funding for managing nuclear waste, and for other purposes.

The purpose of this calculation is to document the LaSalle Unit 1 boiling water reactor (BWR) fuel depletion calculations performed as part of the commercial reactor critical (CRC) evaluation program. The CRC evaluations constitute benchmark calculations that support the development and validation of the neutronics models used for criticality analyses involving commercial spent nuclear fuel in a geologic repository. This calculation incorporates control blade effects and minor variations in the SAS2H assembly modeling.

This report defines issues that need to be addressed by a development program recently initiated to establish the viability of a transuranic program recently initiated to establish the viability of a transuranic burning concept application that would achieve a substantial delay to the need date for a second geologic repository. The visualized transuranic burning concept application is one in which spent fuel created after a date in the 2010 timeframe or later would be processed and the separated plutonium used to start up liquid metal reactors.

The Disposal Criticality Analysis Methodology Topical Report (YMP 2003) presents the methodology for evaluating potential criticality situations in the monitored geologic repository. As stated in the referenced Topical Report, the detailed methodology for performing the disposal criticality analyses will be documented in model reports. Many of the models developed in support of the Topical Report differ from the definition of models as given in the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management procedure AP-SIII.10Q, Models, in that they are procedural, rather than mathematical.

In response to the remand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (Minnesota v. NRC, 602 F.2d 412 (1979)), and as a continuation of previous proceedings conducted in this area by NRC (44 Fed. Reg. 61,372), the Commission initiated a generic rulemaking proceeding on October 25, 1979.

This analysis is prepared by the Mined Geologic Disposal System (MODS) Waste Package Development (WPD) department to provide an evaluation of the criticality potential within a waste package having some or all of its contents degraded by corrosion and removal of neutron absorbers. This analysis is also intended to provide an estimate of the consequences of any internal criticality, particularly in terms of any increase in radionuclide inventory. These consequence estimates will be used as part of the WPD input to the Total System Performance Assessment.

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 document is to present the methodology to be used for development of the Subcritical Limit (SL) for post closure conditions for the Yucca Mountain repository. The SL is a value based on a set of benchmark criticality multiplier, keff> results that are outputs of the MCNP calculation method. This SL accounts for calculational biases and associated uncertainties resulting from the use of MCNP as the method of assessing kerr·

The Total System Model (TSM) is a planning tool that estimates the logistic and cost impacts of
various operational assumptions in accepting radioactive wastes. Waste forms currently tracked
are Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel (CSNF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear
fuel (DOE SNF), and defense high-level (radioactive) waste (HLW). The TSM uses a TSM
Preprocessor (TSMPP) to generate the cask loads and target dates for shipments from waste
sites. The TSM then tracks these wastes from pickup at the waste sites until repository

The purpose of the material degradation and release (MDR) model is to predict the fate of the waste package materials, specifically the retention or mobilization of the radionuclides and the neutron-absorbing material as a function of time after the breach of a waste package during the 10,000 years after repository closure. The output of this model is used directly to assess the potential for a criticality event inside the waste package due to the retention of the radionuclides combined with a loss of the neutron-absorbing material.

This validation report supports the issuance of the Total System Model (TSM) Version 6.0 (Bechtel SAIC, LLC (BSC) 2007a) that is described in the TSM User Manual (UM) (BSC 2007b) and the TSM Pre-Processor (TSMPP) UM (BSC 2007c), and other supporting documentation in References BSC 2007d, BSC 2007e, 2007f, and 2007g. This report assumes the reader has detailed, working knowledge of the TSM functions and Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS) operations.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate dissolved concentration limits (also referred to as solubility limits) of elements with radioactive isotopes under probable repository conditions, based on geochemical modeling calculations using geochemical modeling tools, thermodynamic databases, field measurements, and laboratory experiments.

Japan’s spent fuel management and fuel cycle programs are now at a critical stage. Its first commercial-scale reprocessing plant, at Rokkasho Village, will soon start full-scale operation.

The "Summary Report of Commercial Reactor Criticality Data for LaSalle Unit 1" contains the detailed information necessary to perform commercial reactor criticality (CRC) analyses for the LaSalle Unit 1 (LS 1) reactor.

The Total System Model Preprocessor (TSMPP) is a part of the Total System Model (TSM),
which is a PC-based simulator that is a decision aid to achieve overall Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) disposal objectives. The TSM is identified as Level
3, i.e., not Important To Safety (ITS) and not Important To Waste Isolation (ITWI), software in
the Bechtel SAIC Company, LLC (BSC) Controlled Software Report.
The TSMPP combines information about existing conditions, such as waste inventory estimates

The Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS) Total System Model (TSM), a
Level 3 software, is a planning tool that estimates the logistic and cost impacts of various
operational assumptions in accepting radioactive wastes. Waste forms currently tracked are
commercial spent nuclear fuel (CSNF), Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (DOE
SNF), Naval SNF, and high-level (radioactive) waste (HLW). The TSM simulates the actions for
Waste Acceptance (WA) from discharge to emplacement.

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

The purpose of this calculation is to perform the same reactivity calculations as performed in Reference 7.1 and Reference 7.2 for a set of Laboratory Critical Experiments (LCE) except to change some of the cross section libraries as specified here, and to perform sixteen additional calculations for U233 LCEs.

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 the 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.

Consistent with the mandate issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners v. United States Department of Energy, (Nos. 11-1066 and 11-1068; D.C. Cir. 2013), and notwithstanding the absence of the determination required to be made pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy
Act of 1982 (NWPA), as amended, 42 U.S.C. 10222(a)(4), I hereby propose, subject to any

The purpose of this engineering calculation is to document the MCNP4B2LVevaluations of Laboratory Critical Experiments (LCEs) performed as part of the Disposal Criticality Analysis Methodology program. LCE evaluations documented in this report were performed for 22 different cases with varied design parameters. Some of these LCEs (10) are documented in existing references (Ref. 7.1 and 7.2), but were re-run for this calculation file using more neutron histories.