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.
“Public trust and confidence are really essential to transporting this material, any radioactive material, safely and securely,” said a DOE official who was granted anonymity to describe the department’s reasoning for making the journey.
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.
‘Keep the cask out of Kansas’
The director of the Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Project, a group coordinating state outreach between DOE and a dozen Midwest states, got a taste of it last month during a briefing to a Kansas legislative committee. One lawmaker responded by asking what action the state could take to change the route.
“I want to know if we’ve got time to build some highways over this railroad line to keep this cask out of Kansas,” said Democratic state Rep. John Carmichael.
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.
The cask will be transported aboard a special railcar developed by DOE for transporting spent nuclear fuel. The 12-axle Atlas railcar received certification by the railroad industry in 2024. It will be pulled by a pair of locomotives and flanked by “buffer” flatbed railcars on either side. At the end of the train will be an escort railcar carrying armed guards, surveillance and monitoring equipment.
Traveling at a top speed of about 50 mph, the journey is expected to take about a week.
There’s likely to be a dress rehearsal of the shipment next spring with DOE using an empty fuel cask, borrowed from EPRI, to provide a test loading and unloading it. It will also give the public along the route an up-close look at the Atlas railcar.
The route itself winds south from Virginia through the Carolinas and Georgia before heading back north and through the Midwest and Rocky Mountains. The route specifically avoids the Appalachian region where low overpasses and tunnels make passage impossible for the 12-foot-wide cask.
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.
Putting high burnup fuel to use
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.
“The utilities are extracting more energy from that same fuel, which means that it is resident in the reactor for a longer time, which means it’s experiencing a longer period at high temperature,” said Joe Faldowski, senior program manager for used fuel and high-level waste at EPRI.
“It’s experiencing more irradiation,” Faldowski added. “Those things have potential effects on the end state or condition of the fuel when it comes out of the reactor.”
More than 50 currently operating commercial nuclear power plants that use high burnup fuel are relying on data from the project to meet NRC licensing requirements for storing their spent nuclear fuel on site, according to DOE.
Transporting the cask to INL will allow the cask to be opened and the fuel to be removed in “hot cell” rooms where researchers behind 3-foot-thick leaded glass windows can more closely examine the state of the fuel with mechanical arms.
So far, temperature data from monitors inside the cask is encouraging, Faldowski said. Physical inspection of the fuel will help confirm initial findings.
“Temperatures in the cask have been lower than were predicted,” he said. “We don’t expect to see any real deterioration of the fuel, so the project is really turning out to be more benign than we even expected or hoped.”
