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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.
Sang-Nyung Kim, Byung-Marn Koh, Joon-Suk Ji
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 3 | March 2006 | Pages 304-314
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3709
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When reactivity insertion such as refueling occurs in Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactors, the power and the water level are tilted in the upper outer zone of the liquid zone control system (LZCS) and fluctuate unstably for a certain period of time (1 to 5 days). Such instability is observed in most of the CANDU reactors in service around the world, but neither its root cause has been identified nor have solutions against it been established. Therefore, this study experimentally and analytically attempted to prove that the root cause lies in the holdup of light water on the top of the tube support plate (TSP) due to the mismatch between the net volumetric flow rate of light water and helium crossing the narrowed porous TSP installed within the LZCS compartment by performing hydrodynamic simulation of the inflow/outflow of light water and helium. Two solutions against the aforementioned instability of LZCS were suggested. One is to regulate volumes of helium gas flowing into the compartment and light water flowing therefrom, and the other is to enlarge the flowing paths of helium and light water within the TSP. The former may be applicable to nuclear reactors in service and the latter to those planned to be constructed.