Executive SummaryVibration integrity of high burn-up spent nuclear fuel in transportation remains to be a critical component of US nuclear waste management system. The structural evaluation of package for spent fuel transportation eventually will need to see if the content or spent fuel is in a subcritical condition. However, a system for testing and characterizing such spent fuel is still lacking mainly due to the complication involved with dealing radioactive specimens in a hot cell environment. Apparently, the current state-of-the-art in spent fuel research and development is quite far away from the delivery of reliable mechanical property data for the assessment of spent fuels in the transport package evaluation.Under the sponsorship of US NRC, ORNL has taken the challenge in developing a robust testing system for spent fuel in hot cell. An extensive literature survey was carried out and unique requirements of such testing system were identified. The U-frame setup has come to the top among various designs examined for reverse bending fatigue test of spent fuel rod. The U-frame has many features that deserve mentioned here:• Easy to install spent fuel rod in test;• Less linkages than in conventional bending test setup such as three-point or four-point bending; • Target the failure mode relevant to the fracture of spent fuel rod in transportation by focusing on pure bending;The continuous calibrations and modifications resulted in the third generation (3G) U-frame testing setup.• Rigid arms are split along the LBB axis at rod sample ends. For each arm, this results in a large arm body and an end piece.• Mating halves of bushings were modified into two V-shaped surfaces on which linear roller bearings (LRB) are embedded.• The rod specimen is installed into the test fixture through opening and closing slide endpieces.

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