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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.
Sule Ergun, Jason G. Williams, Lawrence E. Hochreiter, Hergen Wiersema, Marcel Slootman, Marek Stempniewicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 1 | October 2006 | Pages 69-74
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical heat flux (CHF) at a natural boiling condition is an important phenomenon for a research reactor having a small-hydraulic-diameter geometry under a large-break loss-of-coolant accident condition. Accurately predicting the CHF under this condition is very important; therefore, the CHF models used in the best-estimate codes must be validated using appropriate experimental data for a given geometry. The present work focuses on validating the CHF calculations and models within the COolant Boiling in Rod Arrays-Two Fluid (COBRA-TF) code by simulating two sets of experiments, which were performed in tubes and annuli with different length-to-diameter ratios. In this work, the cocurrent upflow and downflow correlations developed by Mishima and Nishihara and Holowach et al. and Zuber correlations for the CHF used in COBRA-TF are validated against the experimental data obtained by Monde and Yamaji and Islam et al. Conclusions on the predictive capability of COBRA-TF for the CHF calculations for small-hydraulic-diameter geometry under natural boiling conditions are provided with the description of the correlations and models used.