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Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Erich A. Schneider, Charles G. Bathke, Michael R. James
Nuclear Technology | Volume 151 | Number 1 | July 2005 | Pages 35-50
Technical Paper | Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management - Core Physics and Fuel Management Methods, Analytical Tools, and Benchmarks | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-4
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
NFCSim is an event-driven, time-dependent simulation code modeling the flow of materials through the nuclear fuel cycle. NFCSim tracks mass flow at the level of discrete reactor fuel charges/discharges and logs the history of nuclear material as it progresses through a detailed series of processes and facilities, generating life-cycle material balances for any number of reactors. NFCSim is an ideal tool for analysis - of the economics, sustainability, or proliferation resistance - of nonequilibrium, interacting, or evolving reactor fleets. The software couples with a criticality and burnup engine, LACE (Los Alamos Criticality Engine). LACE implements a piecewise-linear, reactor-specific reactivity model for its criticality calculations. This model constructs fluence-dependent reactivity traces for any facility; it is designed to address nuclear economies in which either a steady state is never obtained or is a poor approximation. LACE operates in transient and equilibrium fuel management regimes at the refueling batch level, derives reactor- and cycle-dependent initial fuel compositions, and invokes ORIGEN2.x to carry out burnup calculations.