The US Department of Energy (DOE) established the Nuclear Fuels Storage and Transportation Planning Project (NFST) to lay the groundwork for implementing interim storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF), including associated transportation. NFST became the Integrated Waste Management Program (IWM) in October 2016. The United States does not currently operate a large-scale transportation system for SNF, but there is extensive experience worldwide in safely transporting SNF. Under NFST, a review of publicly available information on the transportation of SNF (worldwide) was conducted in an effort to construct a historical record of SNF shipments. Estimates were developed to ascertain the number of fuel assemblies shipped, the number of metric tons of SNF shipped, and the number of shipments made between 1962 and 2016, worldwide. Data for some countries is incomplete or not available, so quantities reported in this paper are lower-bound estimates. However, from this review, it can be concluded that:

• At least 25,400 cask shipments have been made worldwide, but the actual number likely exceeds 44,000. It is also likely that significantly more cask shipments have been made for all forms of SNF considered here. The shipments made within and into the United States account for approximately 10%–17% of this total.

• The quantity of SNF shipped worldwide to date is at least 87,000 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM) and likely more than 109,000 MTHM. This is considered a lower bound since many of the data sources did not report on the heavy metal quantities shipped. Of the quantities reported here, the US accounts for only about 5%–7% of the total.

Additionally, the study identified that at least 130 cask shipments of vitrified high-level radioactive waste (HLW) containing more than 2,350 canisters of HLW have been reprocessed at the plant in La Hague, France, and shipped back to the countries where they had initially been irradiated.