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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Jeffrey A. Favorite
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 142 | Number 3 | November 2002 | Pages 327-341
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE02-A2311
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The standard implementation of the differential operator (Taylor series) perturbation method for Monte Carlo criticality problems has previously been shown to have a wide range of applicability. In this method, the unperturbed fission distribution is used as a fixed source to estimate the change in the keff eigenvalue of a system due to a perturbation. A new method, based on the deterministic perturbation theory assumption that the flux distribution (rather than the fission source distribution) is unchanged after a perturbation, is proposed in this paper. Dubbed the F-A method, the new method is implemented within the framework of the standard differential operator method by making tallies only in perturbed fissionable regions and combining the standard differential operator estimate of their perturbations according to the deterministic first-order perturbation formula. The F-A method, developed to extend the range of applicability of the differential operator method rather than as a replacement, was more accurate than the standard implementation for positive and negative density perturbations in a thin shell at the exterior of a computational Godiva model. The F-A method was also more accurate than the standard implementation at estimating reactivity worth profiles of samples with a very small positive reactivity worth (compared to actual measurements) in the Zeus critical assembly, but it was less accurate for a sample with a small negative reactivity worth.
