Shipments of U.S. spent fuel to the Idaho National Laboratory

Under an agreement between the State of Idaho and the U.S. government, reached in 1995, U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Navy provide the state with information about spent fuel shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory. The table below contains the annual data on the naval spent fuel shipments compiled from the information collected by the Snake River Alliance. It updates the information published in 2018.

The Department of Energy informed the Governor of Idaho that it brought no spent fuel to the state in 2018. It also stated that the Department "has engaged in a program to recycle lightly used research reactor fuel. During 2018, 0.0107 MTHM of [spent nuclear fuel] was withdrawn from the onsite inventory and shipped off site to selected reactors in support of this effort." (This is probably the project to produce HALEU.) DoE said it has no plans to bring spent fuel to or remove it from the state in 2019.

U.S. Navy confirmed that in the calendar year 2018 "one train carried two containers of spent fuel, totaling approximately 0.3 MTHM" (as compared to the projected 0.5 MTHM). The 2019 plan is that "nine trains will carry seventeen shipping containers of naval spent fuel containing a total of approximately 2.0 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM)."

U.S. naval spent fuel shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory