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      I have often blogged about the spent nuclear fuel that is piling up at the commercial nuclear power plant sites in the U.S. For the moment, the spent fuel is kept on site in cooling pools or dry casks made of concrete and steel. The U.S. will not have a undergrounds geological repository to permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel until 2050 at the soonest. When (and if) such a repository is created, it will be necessary to move the spent nuclear fuel from the reactor sites to the repository. It is likely that any repository will be in the southwestern U.S. while most of the nuclear power reactors are east of the Mississippi. This means that thousand of tons of spent nuclear fuel will have to be moved thousands of miles which will take years. Having safe transportation methods is obviously a very important piece of disposing of spent nuclear fuel.
     The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has announced that Holtec International’s HI-STAR 100MB transportation package for moving spent nuclear fuel has been certified for use in the U.S. Holtec says that they expect that the HI-STAR cask is “destined to become America's workhorse for transporting used nuclear fuel.”
    The HI-STAR 100MB is based on the design of the Holtec HI-STAR 100 package. HI-STAR 100 in turn was developed from the HI-STAR 190 cask which was designed for the retrieval of large-diameter canisters from U.S. nuclear power plants with dry cask facilities on site for spent nuclear fuel storage. The HI-STAR 100MB is intended to retrieve medium-sized canisters that contain spent fuel with high-burnups and shorter cooling times that are allowed by the specifications for the HI-STAR 100.
    Holtec says “Among the technology differentiators of the HI-STAR 100MB are its ability to ship contents packaged in an MPC or in a 'bare basket', to transport both moderate burn-up and high burn-up fuel in the various sizes employed in light water reactors, and to transport fuel with as little as 3.5 years of decay after discharge from the reactor.”
    Holtec applied to the NRC for certification for the HI-STAR 100MB in February of last year. When they submitted the application, they expected that the review process would proceed quickly because the design of the HI-STAR 100MB transportation system was directly based on designs that had already been approved by the NRC.
    Holtec said, “The certification of HI-STAR 100MB at present includes the high capacity canister, MCP-32M, and 'bare baskets' F-24M and F-32M, all using Metamic-HT as basket material for optimal performance, The cask is however sized to hold any canister loaded in the industry up to 68.5 inches in diameter which means almost every canister commissioned into dry storage in the US before 2014.”