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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The journey of the U.S. fuel cycle
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
While most big journeys begin with a clear objective, they rarely start with an exact knowledge of the route. When commissioning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson didn’t provide specific “turn right at the big mountain” directions to the Corps of Discovery. He gave goal-oriented instructions: explore the Missouri River, find its source, search for a transcontinental water route to the Pacific, and build scientific and cultural knowledge along the way.
Jefferson left it up to Lewis and Clark to turn his broad, geopolitically motivated guidance into gritty reality.
Similarly, U.S. nuclear policy has begun a journey toward closing the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle. There is a clear signal of support for recycling from the Trump administration, along with growing bipartisan excitement in Congress. Yet the precise path remains unclear.
S.Tina Ghosh, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 70-88
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance assessments (PAs) are important sources of information for societal decisions in high-level radioactive waste (HLW) management, particularly in evaluating safety cases for proposed HLW repository development. Assessing risk from geologic repositories for HLW poses a significant challenge due to the uncertainties in modeling complex systems of such large temporal and spatial scales. Because of the extensive uncertainties, a typical safety case for a proposed HLW repository is comprised of PA results coupled with various defense-in-depth elements, such as the multibarrier requirement for repository design, and insights from supplementary analyses. This paper proposes an additional supplementary analysis, the Strategic Partitioning of Assumption Ranges and Consequences (SPARC), that could be used (a) in a safety case to help build confidence in a repository system and (b) to provide risk information for decisions on how to allocate resources for future research. The SPARC method extracts risk information from existing PAs and supporting databases by uncovering new information - namely, what sets of model parameter values taken together could produce substantially increased doses (SIDs) from the repository - and displays the results in SPARC trees. These sets of parameter values correspond to the failure scenarios of reactor probabilistic risk assessments. The SPARC method is applied to the proposed Yucca Mountain HLW repository, as a demonstrative example, and the results indicate that just one or a couple of the repository features working alone could "save" the repository from SIDs even in extremely challenging conditions. Such insights produced with the SPARC method could help significantly in focusing resources on future research to build confidence in the repository.