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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.
Bela Toth, Klaus Mueller, Jon Birchley, Hozumi Wada, Claude Jamond, Klaus Trambauer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 157 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 132-142
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3808
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the results of pretest calculations of the Phebus fission product release experiment FPT3. The test scenario with the appropriate initial and boundary conditions was provided by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire. For the analyses, three severe accident codes were used: ATHLET-CD, ICARE2, and MELCOR. The calculations were focused on the main phenomena occurring in the bundle, such as the thermal behavior, the hydrogen production mainly due to cladding oxidation, the massive degradation of spent fuel and the release of fission products and control rod and structure materials. Using the predefined boundary and initial conditions, relatively small deviations between the code results were obtained, which demonstrates that the dominant processes occurring during a severe accident in the core of pressurized water reactors can be adequately simulated. By applying these codes to a large spectrum of integral tests as well as to plant analyses, one will obtain reliable results on the fuel bundle behavior. However, the spread in the calculated oxidized boron carbide masses indicates that modeling efforts are still necessary in all the codes in this respect.