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Growth beyond megawatts
Hash Hashemianpresident@ans.org
When talking about growth in the nuclear sector, there can be a somewhat myopic focus on increasing capacity from year to year. Certainly, we all feel a degree of excitement when new projects are announced, and such announcements are undoubtedly a reflection of growth in the field, but it’s important to keep in mind that growth in nuclear has many metrics and takes many forms.
Nuclear growth—beyond megawatts—also takes the form of increasing international engagement. That engagement looks like newcomer countries building their nuclear sectors for the first time. It also looks like countries with established nuclear sectors deepening their connections and collaborations. This is one of the reasons I have been focused throughout my presidency on bringing more international members and organizations into the fold of the American Nuclear Society.
Amanda M. Bachmann, Oleksandr Yardas, Madicken Munk
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 5 | May 2025 | Pages 736-749
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2393940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel depletion is an important aspect of fuel cycle modeling, allowing a user to account for how loaded fuel compositions affect in-core and spent fuel compositions and their related fuel cycle metrics. Therefore, multiple methods have been developed to account for depletion within fuel cycle simulations. This work adds to that list of methods by introducing an open-source coupling between Cyclus and OpenMC to perform fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation, called OpenMCyclus. This work explains the methodology of OpenMCyclus and presents a benchmark comparison between the performance of OpenMCyclus and another Cyclus archetype that uses recipes to define spent fuel compositions. The development of this coupling expands the functionalities possible through Cyclus by providing real-time fuel depletion that is reactor agnostic and open source.