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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.
R. J. Park, S. B. Kim, K. Y. Suh, J. L. Rempe, F. B. Cheung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 3 | December 2006 | Pages 270-281
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detailed analyses of a late-phase melt progression in the advanced power reactor (APR)1400 were completed to identify the melt and the thermal-hydraulic states of the in-vessel materials in the reactor vessel lower plenum at the time of reactor vessel failure to evaluate the candidate strategies for an in-vessel corium retention (IVR). Initiating events considered included high-pressure transients of a total loss of feed water (LOFW) and a station blackout (SBO) and low-pressure transients of a 0.0009-m2 small, 0.0093-m2 medium, and 0.0465-m2 large-break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) without safety injection. Best-estimate simulations for these low-probability events with conservative accident progression assumptions that lead to reactor vessel failure were performed by using the SCDAP/RELAP5/MOD3.3 computer code. The SCDAP/RELAP5/MOD3.3 results have shown that the pressurizer surge line failed before the reactor vessel failure, which results in a rapid decrease of the in-vessel pressure and a delay of the reactor vessel failure time of ~40 min in the high-pressure sequences of the total LOFW and the SBO transients. In all the sequences, ~80 to 90% of the core material was melted and relocated to the lower plenum of the reactor vessel at the time of reactor vessel failure. The maximum value of the volumetric heat source in the corium pool was estimated as 1.9 to 3.7 MW/m3. The corium temperature was ~2800 to 3400 K at the time of reactor vessel failure. The highest volumetric heat source sequence is predicted for the 0.0465-m2 large-break LOCA without safety injection in the APR1400, because this sequence leads to an early reactor vessel failure.