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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.
Geethpriya Palaniswaamy, Sudarshan K. Loyalka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 1 | October 2006 | Pages 29-38
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3771
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear aerosols can originate from severe core damage in light water reactors, core disruptive accidents in fast reactors, nuclear accidents during nuclear material transport, at waste disposal sites, or from explosions and can evolve under natural transport processes as well as under the influence of engineered safety features. Such aerosols can be hazardous for the equipment inside the reactor and when leaked to the environment pose potential risks to the public. However, the computation of aerosol evolution is complicated, and an exploration of the direct simulation Monte Carlo technique to elucidate the role of various physical phenomena that influence the evolution, and eventually to help develop a production computer program, has been undertaken. We have extended here the previous work in important new directions by including most coagulation mechanisms such as Brownian, gravitational, and turbulence. We have also explored the Metropolis algorithm for sampling particles. We have found that the Metropolis algorithm permits efficient simulation of a much larger number of particles because it does not require precomputation and periodic update of the collisional matrix after each collision, unlike the direct sampling method.