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Center for Used Fuel Research: Building confidence in storage and transport
Used nuclear fuel storage and transportation have reached a critical juncture.
Dozens of utilities need reliable data on how used nuclear fuel performs in dry storage casks and canisters to extend regulatory licenses at sites across the United States. Likewise, the Department of Energy expects to take ownership of the used nuclear fuel—termed “spent nuclear fuel” in the laws and regulations governing its stewardship—and transfer it to one or more federal staging facilities for management and disposition.
Meanwhile, dozens of reactor companies are testing prototypes of advanced reactors and advanced reactor fuels. Eventually, regulators and industry must also verify the safety and security of storage methods for these advanced fuel types.
To help address these challenges, the DOE established the Center for Used Fuel Research (CUFR) in January 2026 for work related to the long-term storage and transport of used nuclear fuel.
Milos I. Atz, Massimiliano Fratoni
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 677-695
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2146475
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Future utilization of nuclear power may involve fuel cycles that incorporate new reactors and new fuel utilization schemes. In comparing fuel cycles in terms of their waste characteristics, many previous studies have focused on properties intrinsic to the wastes themselves: mass, radioactivity, and/or radiotoxicity. These properties do not directly inform analyses that evaluate waste management strategies, impacts, or risks. For these, information about waste packages and waste loading is critical. This paper reports on research performed to bridge the divide between nuclear fuel cycle and waste management analyses while accommodating the diversity of reactors, processes, and waste forms that could be utilized by advanced fuel cycles. An object-oriented Python code, Nuclear Waste Analysis in Python, was written to connect fuel cycle data with backend process information, thereby generating waste form characteristics and package inventories. The backend process models are informed by literature review and engineering judgment. The package is applied to the fuel cycles considered in the Fuel Cycle Evaluation and Screening (FCES) study and is benchmarked against the FCES study waste management evaluation metric data for mass and radioactivity. Hypothetical waste package inventories are reported for each fuel cycle as functions of spent fuel and high-level waste loading.