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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.
Masahiro Fukushima, Masaki Andoh, Yasunobu Nagaya
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 10 | October 2026 | Pages 2204-2220
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2583701
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of integral experiments were conducted at the Fast Critical Assembly (FCA) of Japan Atomic Energy Agency using the FCA-XXIII-1 and FCA-XXIV-1 assemblies to simulate a small fast reactor (SFR) with a thick stainless steel reflector. The objective was to provide systematic data for assessing the effects of reflector configurations on the accuracy of neutronic calculations. FCA-XXIII-1 included multiple configurations with partial voids introduced into the reflector to enhance neutron leakage, while FCA-XXIV-1 utilized a depleted uranium blanket to ensure neutron shielding. This paper presents a detailed description of measurements of criticality and reflector reactivity worth under various reflector conditions. Calculations were performed using the MVP3 Monte Carlo code with the JENDL-5 nuclear data library. The calculated effective multiplication factors agreed with the experimental values within 300 pcm, with slight overestimations. Reflector reactivity worths were also well reproduced across configurations, regardless of neutron leakage levels. These results serve as benchmarks for validating computational codes and nuclear data libraries, and they thereby support the reliable design and analysis of SFRs with reflectors.