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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
William Christopher Allen, Man-Sung Yim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 949-956
Miscellaneous | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9332
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current fuel assembly designs can achieve burnups that exceed the design burnups for many shipping casks. A proposed solution for this situation is regionalized loading, which involves administratively separating the fuel basket of a shipping cask into two or more regions and loading fuel with different burnup, cooling times, and enrichments into each region. The analysis evaluated how regionalized loading affected spent-fuel shipments.Fuel having a range of burnups and a shipping cask were used in the analysis. The SCALE5 control module SAS2 was used to develop the radiological source terms, and MCNP5 was used to calculate the dose rates associated with the different loading patterns. The analysis indicated that the use of dual-zone loading patterns violated the principles of as-low-as-reasonably-achievable radiation levels. However, the analysis also showed that dual-zone loading patterns reduced the dose rates associated with shipping high-burnup fuel and reduced the time required to ship the fuel. Further analyses were performed to see if a compromise existed.