A rail journey years in the making will pull away from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia in the fall of 2027 bound for Idaho National Laboratory.
Aboard a specially designed railcar will be a 180-ton lead and steel cask containing spent nuclear fuel. The trip crossing 13 states and traveling more than 2,500 miles will be the first shipment of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors in more than two decades.
The shipment has another purpose: to demonstrate to the public that the government and private industry can safely manage nuclear waste transportation. Next year’s shipment — born out of a collaboration between the Department of Energy and the Electric Power Research Institute — is seen as a potential model for future shipments. The Trump administration is working to resolve the political stalemate over spent nuclear fuel that has made it harder for the United States to expand nuclear power.
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In all, there are some 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at reactors across the U.S. Trump’s DOE, which is responsible for final disposition under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, has indicated interest in finding a long-term answer.
When policymakers studied the plan to build a single repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, DOE contemplated shipping 3,000 metric tons of used fuel per year. That translates to about 40 train shipments a year — or almost three times the volume shipped each year in France, the country that moves more spent fuel than any in the world.
Next year’s shipment, planned for the fall, involves just a single cask of high burnup nuclear fuel that has been in dry cask storage for almost a decade. High burnup fuel is nuclear fuel that’s been used in reactors for a longer period.
While the Navy has shipped 900 used nuclear fuel from submarines and aircraft carriers across the country for more than 60 years, those shipments, handled under a national security exemption, differ in certain ways, including the fact that they are smaller and transported on unmarked railcars without advance notice to states.
DOE shipments of spent fuel from commercial power reactors will be more visible to the public. The department is required to notify states and tribes along the route, even though doing so opens the whole process to political blowback. When it comes to disposal of nuclear fuel, the king of all NIMBY issues, some level of public opposition is all but certain.
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Though the likely route for the shipment wasn’t finalized until recently, planning has been in the works for years. It involves cooperation across a laundry list of federal agencies including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration, Pipeline and Hazardous Material Administration, and the FBI. All of the states along the route are involved as well as more than a dozen tribal governments.
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INL was finalized as the destination for the task in April when the state of Idaho and DOE agree to a targeted waiver of a 1995 legal settlement over nuclear waste disposal. The settlement allows the lab to do research on the fuel cask from North Anna.
The cask holds fuel removed from the Virginia nuclear plant in 2017. DOE and the Electric Research Power Institute have been monitoring temperatures inside the cask since the fuel was removed to see how it behaves over time.
Data being gathered as part of the project will be used to support federal regulatory requirements for storing high burnup fuel in dry casks beyond 40 years.