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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.
YuGwon Jo, Nam Zin Cho
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 2 | February 2016 | Pages 181-196
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-150
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a new method for whole-core Monte Carlo calculation using space domain decomposition to alleviate the excessive memory requirement due to massive tallies. The proposed method is called the fission and surface source (FSS) iteration method; it is based on banking both the fission and surface sources for the next iteration to provide exact boundary conditions for nonoverlapping local problems. To accelerate source convergence during inactive iterations, the p-CMFD (partial current–based coarse-mesh finite difference) method is applied to adjust the weights of the fission and surface sources. While domain-based parallelization is easily implemented using the proposed FSS iteration method, the computing times for the local problems will be different, depending on specific local problems, which may cause idle times of the processors to wait for the results from other local problems. To reduce the idle times, we apply a source-splitting scheme to the FSS iteration method to level the expected numbers of the sources of local problems. The performance of the FSS iteration method is tested on two-dimensional, continuous-energy reactor problems, with encouraging results.