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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.
Hangbok Choi, Ho Jin Ryu, Gyuhong Roh, Chang Joon Jeong, Chang Je Park, Kee Chan Song, Jung Won Lee, Myung Seung Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 157 | Number 1 | January 2007 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3798
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study describes the mechanical compatibility of the direct use of spent pressurized water reactor fuel in Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactors (DUPIC) fuel when it is loaded into a CANDU reactor. The mechanical compatibility can be assessed for the fuel management, primary heat transport system, fuel channel, and fuel handling system in the reactor core by both experimental and analytic methods. Because the physical dimensions of the DUPIC fuel bundle adopt the CANDU flexible (CANFLEX) fuel bundle design, which has already been demonstrated for a commercial use in CANDU reactors, the experimental compatibility analyses focused on the generation of material property data and the irradiation tests of the DUPIC fuel, which are used for the computational analysis. The intermediate results of the mechanical compatibility analysis have shown that the integrity of the DUPIC fuel is mostly maintained under the high-power and high-burnup conditions even though some material properties, such as the thermal conductivity, are a little lower compared to the uranium fuel. However, it is required that the current DUPIC fuel design be changed slightly to accommodate the high internal pressure of the fuel element. It is also strongly recommended that more irradiation tests of the DUPIC fuel be performed to accumulate a database for the demonstration of the DUPIC fuel performance in the CANDU reactor.