ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2026
Nuclear Technology
June 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2026
Latest News
Fuel and the nuclear resurgence: The chicken or the egg conundrum
Nuclear power currently appears to have the wind at its back, with growing demand for clean, reliable energy from industry (think data centers) and strong political support for new projects. But getting there still will require a lot of pieces to yet fall into place. It is, as American Nuclear Society CEO Craig Piercy said, a “chicken and egg” problem: Which comes first, the fuel to supply new reactors or the reactors that will create a demand for new fuel?
Zhen Wang, Jonny Rutqvist, Yuan Wang, Colin Leung, Andrew Hoch, Ying Dai
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 2 | August 2014 | Pages 158-168
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-76
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present an extended multiple interacting continua (Ex-MINC) model of fractured rock masses that uses Oda's crack tensor theory to upscale the hydraulic and mechanical properties. The Ex-MINC concept includes separate connected continua representing active fractures, inactive fractures, and matrix to represent the fracture-matrix system. The crack tensor theory was used to calculate the stress-dependent permeability tensor and compliance tensor for individual grid blocks. By doing this, we transformed a discrete fracture network model into a grid-based continuum model. The Ex-MINC model was verified against an existing analytical solution, and the entire Ex-MINC/crack tensor model approach was applied to a benchmark test (BMT) related to coupled stress, fluid flow, and transport through a 20-×20-m model domain of heavily fractured media. This BMT was part of the international DECOVALEX project for the development of coupled models and their validation, thus providing us with the opportunity to compare our results with the results of independent models. We conducted the coupled hydraulic and mechanical modeling with TOUGH-FLAC, a simulator based on the TOUGH2 multiphase flow code and the FLAC3D geomechanical code. The results of our simulations were generally consistent with the results of the other independent modeling approaches and showed how inactive fractures impeded solute transport through the fractured system by providing an additional fracture surface area as an avenue for increasing fracture matrix diffusion.