page_title: Spent nuclear fuel
section_title: Storage, treatment, and disposal
hierarchical_section_title: Spent nuclear fuel / Storage, treatment, and disposal
caption_attribution_description: English: Georgi Stoyanov, of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, examines the Common Spent Fuel Pool at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on 27 November 2013. Stoyanov is participating in an IAEA expert team that is assessing Japanese efforts to decommission the stricken nuclear power plant. Last week, TEPCO began moving nuclear fuel assemblies from Reactor Unit 4 to the Common Spent Fuel Pool. Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA
context_page_description: Spent nuclear fuel, occasionally called used nuclear fuel, is nuclear fuel that has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor. It is no longer useful in sustaining a nuclear reaction in an ordinary thermal reactor and depending on its point along the nuclear fuel cycle, it may have considerably different isotopic constituents.
context_section_description: Spent nuclear fuel is stored either in spent fuel pools (SFPs) or in dry casks.  In the United States, SFPs and casks containing spent fuel are located either directly on nuclear power plant sites or on Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations (ISFSIs).  ISFSIs can be adjacent to a nuclear power plant site, or may reside elsewhere.  The vast majority of ISFSIs store spent fuel in dry casks.  The Morris Operation is currently the only ISFSI with a spent fuel pool in the United States.
  Nuclear reprocessing can separate spent fuel into various combinations of reprocessed uranium, plutonium, minor actinides, fission products, remnants of zirconium or steel cladding, activation products, and the reagents or solidifiers introduced in the reprocessing itself.  If these constituent portions of spent fuel were reused, and additional wastes that may come as a byproduct of reprocessing are limited, reprocessing could ultimately reduce the volume of waste that needs to be disposed.
  Alternatively, the intact spent nuclear fuel can be directly disposed of as high-level radioactive waste.  The United States has planned disposal in deep geological formations, such as the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, where it has to be shielded and packaged to prevent its migration to humans' immediate environment for thousands of years. On March 5, 2009, however, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that "the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste."
  Geological disposal has been approved in Finland, using the KBS-3 process.
caption: Spent fuel pool at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on 27 November 2013
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