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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.
T. Ozawa, T. Abe
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 1 | October 2006 | Pages 39-55
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT156-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Annular fuel is very beneficial for fast reactors because of its availability for both high power and high burnup. Most of the annular pellets irradiated up to high burnup showed central-hole shrinkage due to deformation and restructuring during irradiation. This shrinkage has a great influence on power-to-melt, which is a main factor in deciding the maximum power in the fuel design. To predict precisely the central-hole shrinkage during irradiation, the CEPTAR code was developed and verified by using the results of various experiments. In this code, the central-hole diameter is decided in accordance with the law of conservation of mass by using the radial profile of fuel density computed with the void migration model, and its deformation caused by the thermal expansion, swelling, and creep is computed by stress-strain analysis using the approximation of plane strain. Furthermore, this code can also estimate the effect of joint oxide gain (JOG) observed in a gap between the cladding and the fuel pellet with high burnup, which tends to decrease the fuel swelling and to improve the gap conductance due to deposition of solid fission product to the JOG layer. In this paper, an outline of the CEPTAR code and the results of verification are presented.