Not your father's trash can

Are you in the canister and cask business? The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) earlier this week released the final performance requirements for the Transportation, Aging and Disposal (TAD) canister for disposal of spent nuclear fuel at a repository to be located at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada. This canister approach should minimize the need for repetitive handling of spent nuclear fuel by using the same canister from the time it leaves a nuclear power plant to its placement in a waste disposal package at Yucca Mountain. “This is one more step in moving the Yucca Mountain Project forward to submit the License Application,” said Edward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM). “We are strongly encouraged by what we have seen so far in the proof-of-concept design phase.”

DOE will shortly initiate procurement for the development of final TAD canister and cask designs. The department will also enter into discussions with nuclear utilities to amend their disposal contracts with DoE to facilitate the use of TAD canisters. DOE anticipates that TAD canisters will be available for commercial use as early as 2011 and expects that up to 90 percent of commercial spent nuclear fuel could be placed in TAD canisters, which means that we are talking about 7,500 TAD canisters for the proposed repository.

In October 2005, after much discussion and debate about how best to store nuclear waste, DoE settled on the TAD-based approach because, it argued, it obviates the need for constructing several multi-million square foot, multi-billion dollar facilities for handling spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain repository.

Yucca Mountain was approved in 2002 by the Congress and the president as the site for the nation’s first permanent spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste geologic repository. DoE’s license application for authorization to construct the repository, which is scheduled to be submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on or before 30 June 2008, will incorporate the TAD approach. The final TAD requirements are available on the OCRWM Web site under “What’s new.”