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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.
Joonhong Ahn, Paul L. Chambré, Byung-Hyun Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 155 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 226-247
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3758
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model for mass flow in a transmutation system has been established for a chain of two transuranic (TRU) radionuclides. The nonrecursive solutions for the fractions of the two TRU radionuclides in the transmuter core before and after the irradiation in the i'th cycle have been obtained by the similarity transformation. With the nonrecursive analytical solutions, the TRU reduction ratio has been formulated as a performance measure for the system. The stability of the system has been defined in terms of the moduli of the eigenvalues of the system. The conditions for a stable system and for a system to reach a quasi-steady state with fewer cycles have been shown in terms of the system parameters. A large value of the nondimensionalized destruction coefficient d is beneficial for effective waste reduction because (a) the system reaches a quasi-steady state faster; (b) the TRU mass in the waste can be reduced more effectively; and (c) the precursor effect becomes negligible, and each radionuclide can be approximately treated as a single radionuclide without precursors.