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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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The journey of the U.S. fuel cycle
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
While most big journeys begin with a clear objective, they rarely start with an exact knowledge of the route. When commissioning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson didn’t provide specific “turn right at the big mountain” directions to the Corps of Discovery. He gave goal-oriented instructions: explore the Missouri River, find its source, search for a transcontinental water route to the Pacific, and build scientific and cultural knowledge along the way.
Jefferson left it up to Lewis and Clark to turn his broad, geopolitically motivated guidance into gritty reality.
Similarly, U.S. nuclear policy has begun a journey toward closing the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle. There is a clear signal of support for recycling from the Trump administration, along with growing bipartisan excitement in Congress. Yet the precise path remains unclear.
Matthew A. Gonzales, Brian C. Kiedrowski, Anil K. Prinja, Forrest B. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2018 | Pages 1-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1442546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The heavy-gas model with specific energy-dependent absorption cross sections is used to construct analytical, semi-analytical, and numerical free-gas scattering benchmarks for the neutron spectrum, effective multiplication factor k, and temperature coefficient in an infinite, homogeneous medium. The energy dependences considered are piecewise constant, constant plus inverse in energy, and piecewise linear. Analytic forms for k and in terms of hypergeometric functions are obtained for piecewise-constant absorption with two energy ranges and for constant-plus-inverse-in-energy absorption. Analogous semi-analytical integral expressions are obtained for piecewise-linear absorption with two energy ranges. Numerical solutions of a linear system are obtained for piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear absorption for greater than two energy ranges. The heavy-gas model solutions of k are compared with continuous-energy Monte Carlo calculations; the results converge to the heavy-gas model with increasing target mass ratio A, demonstrating the heavy-gas model’s utility as a verification benchmark.