This paper describes the lessons learned from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) transportation of
125 DOE-owned commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies by railroad from the West Valley Demonstration
Project to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). On July 17, 2003, DOE made
the largest single shipment of commercial SNF in the history of the United States. This was a highly visible and
political shipment that used two specially designed Type B transportation and storage casks. This paper describes

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.

There have been roughly 2,600 shipments of commercial spent fuel in this country over the past three decades or so. Although this is not an enormous volume by European standards, it is nevertheless significant. These shipments fall into two general categories: individual and "campaign."
There have been a number of individual shipments where lead test assembly fuel was shipped from a reactor to a laboratory for examination. This is an important part of reactor fuel development.

With the Department of Energy’s (DOE) recent submittal of a license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the development of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as a national nuclear waste repository moves one step closer to reality. An operating site at Yucca Mountain could receive between 38-106 rail shipments and 53-89 truck shipments annually over a period of 50 years.