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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
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.