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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
B. M. Rothleder, G. R. Poetschat, W. S. Faught, W. J. Eich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 4 | December 1988 | Pages 440-450
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fuel shuffling problem is posed by the need to reposition partially burned assemblies to achieve minimum X-Y pin power peaks in reload cycles of pressurized water reactors. This problem is a classic artificial intelligence (AI) problem and is highly suitable for AI expert system solution assistance, in contrast to the conventional solution, which ultimately depends solely on trial and error. Such a fuel shuffling assistant would significantly reduce engineering and computer execution time for conventional loading patterns and, much more importantly, even more significantly for lowleakage loading patterns. A successful hardware /software demonstrator has been introduced, paving the way for development of a broadly applicable expert system program. Such a program, upon incorporating the recently developed technique of reverse depletion, would provide a directed path for solving the low-leakage problem.