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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Wei-Nian Su, Shih-Jen Wang, I-Ming Huang, Show-Chyuan Chiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 155 | Number 3 | September 2006 | Pages 253-264
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3760
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Containment flooding is an important strategy for severe accident management of a conventional boiling water reactor (BWR) system. The execution of containment flooding requires information about the water level in the primary containment. However, there is no instrument to measure the drywell water level for most Mark-III systems. Furthermore, because of the design feature of the Mark-III containment, the water level in the containment does not necessarily guarantee that there is an equivalent water level in the drywell. Therefore, the development of a drywell water level computational aid becomes very useful. The purpose of this work is to develop and validate the drywell water level computational aid and to investigate the implementation of the proposed computational aid on the containment flooding strategy of a Mark-III system. The Kuosheng nuclear power plant (NPP) is a typical BWR-6 NPP with Mark-III containment, and the Severe Accident Management Guideline (SAMG) of the Kuosheng NPP has been developed based on the BWR Owners' Group Emergency Procedure Guidelines and Severe Accident Guidelines, Revision 2. Therefore, the Kuosheng NPP is selected as the plant for study, and the MAAP4 code is chosen as the tool for analysis.
