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Disposal and Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel — Finding the Right Balance

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended, established a statutory basis
for managing the nation’s civilian (or commercially produced) spent nuclear
fuel. The law established a process for siting, developing, licensing, and constructing
an underground repository for the permanent disposal of that waste.
Utilities were given the primary responsibility for storing spent fuel until it is
accepted by the Department of Energy (DOE) for disposal at a repository —
originally expected to begin operating in 1998. Since then, however, the repository

Nuclide Importance to Criticality Safety, Decay Heating, and Source Terms Related to Transport and Interim Storage of High-Burnup LWR Fuel

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.

AN ANALYSIS OF INJURIES AT DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY WORK SITES

The Construction Industry Research and Policy Center (CIRPC) at the University of Tennessee was awarded a contract by the Center to Protect Workers’ Rights, under their grant program with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), to analyze injuries of employees of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and their contractors’ working at DOE work sites. The injury data analyzed were injuries recorded in DOE’s Computerized Accident Incident Reporting System (CAIRS).

Waste Acceptance System Requirements Document, Revision 5, ICN 01

The purpose of this document is to establish waste acceptance technical requirements for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS). These requirements and functions consist of two types: (a) internal CRWMS requirements derived from the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System Requirements Document (CRD) (DOE 2007a) as illustrated in Figure 1, and (b) acceptance criteria imposed by the CRWMS on spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level waste (HLW) delivered into the CRWMS.

Enhancing the Role of State and Local Governments in America’s Nuclear Future: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

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

Monitoring of Geological Disposal Facilities: Technical and Societal Aspects

Each and every geological disposal project requires the collection of large amounts of information on
its progress throughout the facility’s lifecycle. This information is based on the monitoring and
surveillance of the selected site, built structures and their surrounding environment. Monitoring is carried
out to assist in the decision-making process, to collect site-relevant information for the creation of an
environmental database, to gain an understanding and to verify the performance of the disposal system, to

Yucca Mountain - Nevada's Perspective

Yucca Mountain—that barren rise in the desert ninety miles from Las Vegas—is the nation‘s only site identified for the potential location of the first ge ological repository for commercially-generated HLNW and SNF. Many assume
that Yucca Mountain has geologic and climatic qualities that make it uniquely
suitable to isolate the thousands of metric tons of the world‘s most lethal, long lived waste currently accumulating at 104 operating nuclear power plants across the United States.
Unfortunately, Yucca Mountain is an exceptionally bad site,

The Problem of used nuclear fuel: lessons for interim solutions from a comparative cost analysis

An acceptable long-term solution for used (spent) fuel from nuclear power reactors has evaded all countries engaged in the civilian
nuclear fuel cycle. Furthermore, many countries are trying to develop interim storage solutions that address the shortage of storage in
the spent fuel cooling pools at reactors. The United States has a particularly acute problem due to its adherence to an open fuel cycle
and its large number of reactors. Two main options are available to address the spent fuel problem: dry storage on-site at reactors and

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