Spent Nuclear Fuel (last updated July 2008)
The Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) mission is to safely and efficiently manage its Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) and prepare it for disposal in a geologic repository. In completing this mission, EM will work with stakeholders and Tribal governments and will help protect the environment and the health and safety of workers and the public by fully complying with applicable Federal, State, and local laws, orders, and regulations. Through the National Environmental Policy Act, a decision was made in 1995 to consolidate DOE-owned SNF at existing DOE sites that have the skills, facilities, and technologies to best handle the fuel. Based on the decisions from the associated environmental impact statement, DOE will temporarily store its SNF at the Hanford Site in Washington, the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho, and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina until a repository is completed. The Hanford Site will retain most of its current inventory of SNF. The remaining DOE SNF will be consolidated at either the INL or SRS, depending on the type of fuel. EM is currently managing approximately 2400 MTHM of SNF at the three sites: approximately 2100 MTHM at RL; about 30 MTHM at SRS and about 260 MTHM at INL. At INL, EM is planning to provide a SNF dry storage, packaging, and load-out capability. This capability would provide dry storage capacity for all SNF at INL and the ability to prepare and package the fuel into a “road ready” condition as well as to enable DOE to meet the Idaho Settlement Agreement dates of having all SNF in dry storage by 2023 and out of Idaho by 2035. INL also receives and stores SNF from domestic and foreign test and research reactors. At Hanford, a SNF project was formed specifically to address the urgent need to move SNF from degraded wet storage conditions in the 105 K East (KE) and the 105 K West (KW) Basins in the 100 K Area along the Columbia River Corridor. About 80% of the DOE’s remaining SNF was stored in the K Basins when the project began. The project completed fuel removal from deficient storage conditions in the K Basins in October 2004, thus decreasing risks to the public, workers, and the environment. The SNF was dried and placed in temporary storage in steel tubes below ground until a national geologic repository is available. At the completion of the SNF project, work to remove sludge, water and some of the debris from the K Basins was moved into a new project called the K Basins Closure (KBC) project. The KBC project also is responsible for encasing the K Basins (with some of their debris) in special concrete called grout, removing the basins, and burying them as waste. In addition to the SNF in the K Basins, approximately 30 metric tons of non-defense production reactor SNF has been stored at various locations at the Hanford Site. The SNF project is consolidating most of this fuel in the Canister Storage Building/200 Area for safe interim storage. SRS provides for the safe receipt and interim storage of SNF assemblies including SNF from domestic and foreign test and research reactors. Only L-Basin still contains and receives SNF. The basins have concrete walls 3 feet thick and hold 3.5 million gallons of water with pool depths of 17 to 30 feet to provide cooling and shielding to protect workers from radiation. The SNF stored and received at L-Basin is either planned to be transferred to H-Area facilities for processing and disposition or to INL for consolidation and to prepare and package into a “road ready” condition.