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Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
Jeffrey W. Dickinson, Andrew C. Klein
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 2 | May 1996 | Pages 205-223
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35250
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modeling efforts are undertaken to perform coupled thermal-hydraulic and thermionic analysis for both single-cell and multicell thermionic fuel elements (TFE). The analysis—and the resulting MCTFE computer code (multicell thermionic fuel element) — is a steady-state finite volume model specifically designed to analyze cylindrical TFEs. It employs an iterative successive overrelaxation solution technique to solve for the temperatures throughout the TFE and a coupled thermionic routine to determine the total TFE performance. The calculated results include temperature distributions in all regions of the TFE, axial interelectrode voltages and current densities, and total TFE electrical output parameters including power, current, and voltage. MCTFE-generated results compare experimental data from the single-cell Topaz-II-type TFE and multicell data from the General Atomics 3H5 TFE to benchmark the accuracy of the code methods.