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Conference Spotlight
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.
T. A. Taiwo, E. A. Hoffman, R. N. Hill, W. S. Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 155 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 55-66
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3745
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transuranics (TRU) breakeven and burner core designs have been studied for the Pebble-Bed Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (PB-GCFR), which was developed under a 2-yr U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Research Initiative project. The issues of minimizing waste production, fuel cost, and burnup reactivity swing, and maximizing TRU burning have been investigated primarily from a neutronics viewpoint. For TRU breakeven cores, it was found that for the given core power [300 MW(thermal)] and power density (50 MW/m3), the lowest amount of radiotoxic TRU to be processed is obtained for a long-life (single-batch) core of 30-yr duration. Minimizing the TRU processed results in a minimization of the TRU losses that ultimately will have to be entombed in a geologic repository.The results show that the single-batch, long-life PB-GCFR could be designed to operate over a wide range of cycle lengths and fuel loadings. By modifying the TRU feed to have a higher minor actinide (MA) fraction than contained in light water reactor spent fuel, the burnup reactivity swing for the long-life core can be reduced significantly. With this approach, it is also possible to configure the long-life PB-GCFR core as a TRU burner using nonuranium fuel. A nonuranium fuel PB-GCFR with 24% plutonium and 76% MAs can operate for 17 full-power years and achieve 25% burnup with a reactivity swing of 3%k.
