WASTES-II, a logistics simulation tool for assessing system performance of the commercial nuclear waste management system

The simulation of the movement of spent nuclear fuel within the commercial waste management system is a necessary precursor to evaluating the performance of any proposed configuration of a commercial waste management system (CWMS). The waste system transport and economic simulation (WASTES) model simulates the movement and storage of spent fuel from the time it is discharged into individual reactor pools to the time it is placed in a mined geologic repository. The original development of the WASTES model was jointly sponsored by the Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) Program Office at Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) and the Transportation Technology Center at Sandia National Laboratories. Enhancements to the WASTES model that resulted in the development of the WASTES-II model were sponsored by both the MRS program at PNL (for use in analyzing the effects of various policy decisions, waste system logistics considerations, and facility operating schedules) and the PNL Nuclear Waste Fund Analysis program (to provide transportation economics for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Total System Life-Cycle cost (TSLCC) analysis program). The model was designed to provide detailed analyses that were beyond the capabilities of other available models. WASTES uses discrete event simulation techniques to model the generation of commercialmore » spent nuclear fuel, the buildup of spent-fuel inventories within the system, and the movement of spent fuel throughout the system.« less