TRANSPORTATION OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS - Environmentally Conscious Materials Handling - page 221

disposal, the liquid will be evaporated, and the remaining calcine will be mixed
with a glass frit, melted, and poured into canisters where it will be allowed to
cool. The canisters are expected to be about the size of used nuclear fuel bundles
from commercial nuclear power plants and are to be buried in the deep geologic
repository.
Used nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants was not reprocessed
until a demonstration commercial fuel reprocessing plant was constructed in West
Valley, New York, in 1966. That plant operated as a nuclear fuel reprocessing
facility from 1966 to 1972 before being shut down because it was economi-
cally not feasible (USDOE 2008e). U.S. policy shifted in 1977, and reprocessing
of commercial used nuclear fuel was prohibited because of worries about the
security of plutonium that had been separated from the rest of the used fuel. In
2007, the policy shifted again. The U.S. government proposed the Global Nuclear
Energy Partnership (GNEP), under which countries with used fuel reprocessing
capabilities would reprocess fuel for countries that did not have such capabilities
(GNEP 2007). One goal of GNEP was to reduce the chances that plutonium from
reprocessed used fuel can be diverted. As part of the GNEP program, Argonne
National Laboratory began developing a new reprocessing methodology, known
as UREX 1a, which does not isolate plutonium. The process also removes some

of the fission products that can be treated separately, rather than being sent to
the repository, thus further reducing the required repository capacity.
The composition of high-level waste from commercial used nuclear fuel repro-
cessed in the future will depend on the reprocessing methodology selected. The
waste is likely to contain some of the fission products and trace amounts of ura-
nium and plutonium. HLW currently stored at nuclear weapons facilities contains
many of the fission products that emit high-energy gamma rays. As a result, casks
for transporting HLW will need to provide shielding similar to that required for
used nuclear fuel.

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3 AMOUNTS AND LOCATIONS OF USED NUCLEAR FUEL

AND HLW TO BE TRANSPORTED
There are currently 104 nuclear power plants operating in the United States,
generating about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Figure 8.5 shows the
location of these plants. Each plant replaces about one-third of its fuel every 18
to 24 months. After being removed from the reactor, the used fuel is first sent to
a spent fuel storage pool at the nuclear power plant. According to the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government was to begin removing that
fuel from storage pools and disposing of it in a deep geologic repository in 1998.
Since the repository is not ready, and is not widely expected to be ready before
2020 (C&E News 2008), used nuclear fuel is accumulating at the nuclear power
plants. At some sites, the spent fuel pools are full. At those sites, the oldest used
fuel is being stored in dry storage casks on site. The total amount of used nuclear
fuel from commercial power plants awaiting disposal was about 47,000 metric