The United States Department of Energy (U.S. DOE) is planning for the transportation, storage, and disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) from commercial nuclear power plants and other U.S. DOE sites. The Stakeholder Tool for Assessing Radioactive Transportation (START) is a web-based, geospatial decision-support tool developed for evaluating routing options and other aspects of transporting SNF and HLW via barge, train, truck, and intermodal surface transport in the continental United States. The verification and validation (V&V) effort is intended to independently assess START to provide confidence in the ability of the tool to accurately provide intended outputs. The results selected for the V&V effort of the START code include those identified as crucial outputs by subject matter experts. Outputs from START such as shape files and keyhole markup language (KML) files are analyzed using a geodesic computation using the WSG-84 ellipsoid model. Most of the V&V efforts are aimed towards examining and comparing the total length reported in the various files in the START tool. This work also focuses on the development of V&V methodologies for various outputs that could be replicated by the end user on a set of user-defined routes. Over 150 origin destination pairs were run as part of this effort to test the functionality of the START tool. In addition to presenting results using an independent geodesic computation, this work will provide a comparison of the total route lengths between START version 3.3 and the previous release of START (version 3.2.2).

翻译：美国能源部（U.S. DOE）正计划对来自商业核电站及其他美国能源部场址的乏燃料（SNF）和高水平放射性废物（HLW）进行运输、贮存与处置。放射性运输评估利益相关者工具（START）是基于网络的地理空间决策支持工具，旨在评估通过驳船、火车、卡车及多式联运地表运输方式在美国本土运输SNF和HLW的路线选择及其他相关方面。验证与确认（V&V）工作旨在独立评估START，以增强对该工具准确提供预期输出结果的信心。为START代码V&V工作选定的结果包括由领域专家确定的关键输出。来自START的输出（如形状文件和关键标记语言KML文件）采用基于WSG-84椭球模型的大地测量计算方法进行分析。大多数V&V工作致力于检查并比较START工具中各类文件报告的总长度。本研究还侧重于开发适用于多种输出的V&V方法，这些方法可被终端用户在一组自定义路线中复现。作为此项工作的一部分，共运行了超过150个起讫点配对以测试START工具的功能。除展示使用独立大地测量计算的结果外，本研究还将提供START 3.3版本与先前发布版本（3.2.2）之间总路线长度的比较。