The Waste Management Symposium 2007 is the most recent in a long series that has been held at Tucson, AZ. The meeting has become extremely popular as a venue for technical exchange, marketing and networking involving upward of 1800 persons involved with various aspects of radioactive waste management. However, in a break with tradition, the symposium organisers reported that next year’s Waste Management Symposium would be held at the Phoenix, AZ Convention Center. Most of the WM07 sessions dealt with the technical and institutional issues relating to the resolution of waste disposal and processing challenges, including a number of sessions dealing with related transport activities. Please go to http://www.wmsym.org for further information and the full programme of this year’s symposium. This year, six sessions directly related to transport that are summarised in this report: (i) Critical Issues for Yucca Mountain Transportation (Session 7) (ii) Perspectives and Practices in Packaging and Transportation (Session 26) (iii) New Developments in Transportation Operations (Session 39) (iv) Poster Session on Packaging and Transportation (Session 60D) (v) Transportation Packaging, Analysis and Testing (Session 70) (vi) Current Topics and Issues in US Packaging and Transportation (Session 78). In the following discussion, the lead author or the presenting author are the only ones referred to, but most papers had multiple authors. In some cases, presentations were made by non-authors substituting for authors who were unable to attend. Session 7’s lead paper was concerned with the national academies report ‘Going the distance’ relating to issues in transport of spent fuel and high level waste to a Yucca Mountain repository (YMR) and potentially, to the independent temporary storage facility in Utah. This paper, provided by Kevin Crowley of the NAS, is the subject of another paper authored by Crowley in this issue of Journal of Packaging, Transport, Storage and Security of Radioactive Material so no further discussion is included here. Two of the papers discussed issues concerning routing of the shipments to a YMR should it be approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and become operational. The first of these was provided by Gary Lanthrum of the US Department of Energy (DOE) that discussed legal and procedural issues related to the various environmental impact statements (EISs) needed to continue development of a rail line to the repository within the state of Nevada. This process has been made more complicated by the addition of a second potential rail corridor to the site from northwest Nevada (in addition to the initial choice of an east–west alignment to YMR). The second of these routing papers was provided by Jay Jones of DOE and discussed route selection process issues (road and rail) for getting waste to the repository. In addition, the paper provided examples of successful prior shipping campaigns, e.g. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), Foreign Research Reactor Return Program, with routing activities that involved cooperation between the public and DOE to determine acceptable routes. The last paper of the session provided by Robert Halstead and James Ballard presented the views of the State of Nevada (the proposed repository host state) relating to potential security problems with transport and failures to resolve a number of policy issues needed to define what and how the repository would be designed and operated. On the security matters, the authors took issue with assessment of the consequences of a release due to sabotage (too low) as well as potential attack modes (too limited). In presenting the paper, Ballard suggested some alternative sociology related concepts for analysing the potential for, and importance of, non-radiological consequences of a terror attack on a radioactive material shipment as well as its potential likelihood. Session 26 had five papers presented and originally contained two papers looking at Yucca Mountain transportation risk, but the first paper in the session was withdrawn. Eileen Supko of Energy Resources International presented the first paper of the session. She provided a nuclear industry evaluation of transport accident risk using RADTRAN 5?5 that supported the DOE’s view that accident risk was small and not a threat to public safety. Supko looked at scenarios that were judged to be more realistic than those considered by DOE in the Final EIS. As a result, the accident risk estimates are 30 to 50% lower than those published for the YMR programme. The second paper, presented by Dennis Ashworth of DOE, was an overview paper of DOE’s environmental management (EM) transportation practices related to movement of DOE’s waste materials, such as transuranic (TRU) waste to the WIPP and uranium processing remediation wastes to a disposal site in Clive, UT. Very positive results were given for the many transport programmes operated by DOE EM to move its waste materials to repositories and to shut down closed facilities. The third paper provided by Ella 10025 Barrinson NE, Albuquerque, NM 87111, USA Sandia National Laboratories MS-0718, Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA