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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.
Michel Amblard, Jean-Marc Delhaye, Karine Froment, Jean-Marie Seiler, Bruno Tourniaire
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 3 | March 2006 | Pages 315-325
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3710
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the ANAIS experiments, water was injected as a jet or a spray at a given temperature and a given flow rate onto a superheated (~1600°C) molten steel layer for an imposed value of the heat rate delivered to the steel layer by induction heating. At the beginning of a test, water was injected during a few seconds with a high flow rate. Thereafter, the flow rate was decreased to evacuate the thermal power under steady-state conditions. The heat generation rate in the metal was maintained during the water injection at ~1 MW/m2, which represents a typical reactor situation. The test results showed that the steel-water heat transfer led to different final situations depending on the injection mode and water velocity. In addition, the water-cooling power was rather high at the very beginning of the transient and comparable to the heat rate delivered to the metal layer in steady-state conditions. Also, it was observed that no steam explosion occurred in any case, and that a solid layer always formed at the steel free-surface.