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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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Latest News
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.
Masato Takahashi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 2 | November 2006 | Pages 140-149
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3780
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioactive fission gases (krypton and xenon) are observed in boiling water reactor (BWR) plants without defective fuel under various operation conditions. The off-gas in a BWR plant without defective fuel arises from fissile impurities within the cladding materials and/or fissile material deposited on the cladding surface. To estimate the off-gas source in operating plants, the source estimation method considering the off-gas transport time from production to measurement was applied to the data collected under various plant operation conditions. This method was verified by the adaptation of three sets of off-gas data groups to the source of cladding impurity and/or deposition actually observed in the plants. The judgment as to whether off-gas derives from a cladding impurity or a deposition was made by analyzing the data of 11 BWRs with different off-gas levels.
