Comprehensive and interactive: The website was built with comprehensive data from 2025. Under “Status of Spent Fuel Inventory,” it shows the status of the discharged spent fuel inventory, broken down into the categories of spent fuel reprocessed and spent fuel stored, dry storage and wet storage, storage buildings, concrete casks, vertical units (ventilated and nonventilated), metallic casks, and horizontal units. As of June 24, the total global discharged spent fuel inventory was 447,758 metric tons of heavy metal (tHM). Of that total, about 322,000 tHM are in storage, and about 126,000 tHM has been reprocessed (which allows recycling into new fuel and reduces the need for disposal).
The website also includes a world map with clickable countries and regions, each of which shows detailed breakdowns of the various inventory categories. For example, the United States map shows an overall discharged spent fuel amount of 94,926 tHM, representing 21.2 percent of the world total. The largest amounts of this spent U.S. fuel are in wet storage (41,445 tHM), ventilated vertical units (33,383 tHM), and horizontal units (16,808 tHM).
According to the IAEA, “Because the figures come from the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention, the overview is both comprehensive and a measure of what international reporting can achieve.”
This tool is the second version of the IAEA’s Global SNF Inventory. The first version was released in 2019 with noninteractive data from that year’s reporting of the IAEA Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management. Unlike that first version, the new version has interactive features for users and, in addition to Joint Convention data for 2025, it is supplemented with other publicly available information on SNF.
The online tool also includes descriptions of wet and dry storage technologies, which have been structured to match the latest edition of the IAEA Guidebook on Spent Fuel Storage Options and Systems. The agency notes that the data show the “shift to dry storage technologies, reflecting decades of national decisions to move older fuel out of the spent fuel pools and into casks, buildings, and modules.”
Transparent and accessible: Amparo Gonzalez Espartero, the technical lead in the IAEA Division of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, said that the “newly developed IAEA spent fuel data tool provides a transparent and accessible platform for exploring spent fuel management strategies across member states. . . . By displaying information on worldwide spent fuel inventories in a structured manner, including reprocessed and stored spent fuel in different storage systems, the tool benefits technical analysis, and facilitates informed discussions on long-term spent fuel management strategies among countries and interested stakeholders.”
