The success of the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Program of the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) is critical to U.S. ability to manage and dispose of
nuclear waste safely--and to the reestablishment of confidence in the nuclear energy
option in the United States. The program must conform with all applicable standards
and, in fact, set the example for a national policy on the safe disposal of radioactive
waste.
The Secretary of Energy has recently completed an extensive review of the

In the past, criticality analysis of pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel stored in racks and casks has assumed that the fuel is fresh with the maximum allowable initial enrichment. If credit is allowed for fuel burnup in the design of casks that are used in the transport of spent light water reactor fuel to a repository, the increase in payload can lead to a significant reduction in the cost of transport and a potential reduction in the risk to the public. A portion of the work has been performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in support of the U.S.

The so-called nuclear renaissance has increased worldwide interest in nuclear power.
This potential growth also has increased, in some quarters, concern that nonproliferation
considerations are not being given sufficient attention. In particular, since the introduction of
many new power reactors will lead to requiring an increase in uranium enrichment services to
provide the reactor fuel, the proliferation risk of adding enrichment facilities in countries that do

Recognizing that Idaho has a major strategic and economic interest in maintaining INL’s leadership role and in helping
the nuclear energy industry successfully meet these broader challenges, Idaho governor C.L. “Butch” Otter established
the Leadership in Nuclear Energy or “LINE” Commission in February 2012.

The Governor recognized that recent national developments in the nuclear energy sector will cause the State of Idaho to
face important choices in the future and that he needed to understand the best options available.

The AMFM Panel has submitted its report "Managing Nuclear
Waste - A Better Idea" to the Secretary. The report contains six
general conclusions and one general recommendation in Chapter
XII. In addition, Chapter X contains 14 specific enhancements
("Key Components of Any Waste Management Structure") that are
recommended for implementation by the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management (OCRWM) or any alternative organization.
This paper lists and discusses the 6 general conclusions, the

How to dispose of highly radioactive wastes from commercial nuclear power plants is a question that has remained unresolved in the face of rapidly changing technological, economic, and political requirements. In the three decades following World War II, two federal agencies--the Atomic Energy Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration--tried unsuccessfully to develop a satisfactory plan for managing high level wastes.

Approximately 54,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored at operating nuclear power plants and several decommissioned power plants throughout the country. Spent fuel storage at these sites was never intended to be permanent. The current Federal plan is to place the fuel in a repository for permanent disposal in Nevada at Yucca Mountain.

The Standard Review Plan (SRP) is prepared for the guidance of staff reviewers in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in performing safety reviews of applications to construct or operate nuclear power plants. The principal purpose of the SRP is to assure the quality and uniformity of staff reviews, and to present a well-defined base from which to evaluate proposed changes in the scope and requirements of reviews.

This guidance manual provides the NRC staff methodology for calculating parameters for limiting conditions of operation required in the radiological effluent Technical Specifications for light-water-cooled nuclear power plants. it provides guidance in using the model specifications reported in NUREG-0472 (Revision 1)*, and NUREG-0473 (Revision 1)*, applicable to operating PWR and BWR licensees, and users of the Standard Technical Specifications packages available for various vendor designs.

In the course of producing electrical power in light water reactors (LWRs), the uranium
fuel accumulates fission products until the fission process is no longer efficient.for power
production. At that point the fuel is removed from the reactor and stored in water basins
to allow radioactivity to partially decay before further disposition. This fuel is referred
to as "spent fuel." Although spent fuel as it is discharged from a reactor is intensely
radioactive, it has been stored safely in moderate quantities for decades. Spent fuel could

This report has been prepared by an ad-hoc Working Group (WG) formed by ANDRA (France), NUMO (Japan), NAGRA (Switzerland) and ENRESA (Spain) in May 2003, after the EDRAM meeting held in Valencia to study the situation in the different EDRAM member countries regarding the treatment of radioactive waste ownership and management of long-term liabilities.

The recent experiments conducted by Argonne National Laboratory on high burnup fuel cladding material property show that the ductile to brittle transition temperature of high burnup fuel cladding is dependent on: (1) cladding material, (2) irradiation conditions, and (3) drying-storage histories (stress at maximum temperature) [1]. The experiment results also show that the ductile to brittle temperature increases as the fuel burnup increases.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended (NWPA), establishes a process for the siting, construction and operation of one or more national repositories for permanent disposal of the Nation’s spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW). In 1987, after the Department of Energy (the Department or DOE) had conducted studies of nine potential repository sites located throughout the United States, Congress amended the NWPA and selected the Yucca Mountain site in Nye County, Nevada as the only site for further study for the first national repository.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (the Act), established a
step-by-step process for the siting of the nation's first repository for
high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. The Act gave the Department of
Energy (DOE) the primary responsibility for conducting this siting process.
The first step in the process laid out in the Act was the development by
the DOE, with the concurrence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), of
general guidelines to be used by the Secretary of the DOE (the Secretary) in

Present regulatory practices provide as much burnup credit flexibility as can be currently
expected. Further progress is achievable by incorporating the negative reactivity effects of a
subset of neutron-absorbing fission-product isotopes, and by optimizing the procedural approach
for establishing the burnup characteristics of the spent fuel to be loaded in burnup-creditdesigned
storage and transportation systems. This report describes progress toward developing a

From 1998 to 2004, a series of critical experiments referred to as the fission product (FP) experimental program was performed at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique Valduc research facility. The experiments were designed by Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) and funded by AREVA NC and IRSN within the French program supporting development of a technical basis for burnup credit validation.