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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.
Mong J. Yu, Chan S. Kim, Kune Y. Suh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 157 | Number 3 | March 2007 | Pages 261-276
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3817
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quenching experiments were performed to examine the effect of inclination angles and curvature on film-boiling heat transfer. The experiments employed a 294-mm-diam, 30-mm-thick stainless steel downward-facing hemisphere to substantiate the local film-boiling mechanism along the angular surface. Forty-six thermocouples were installed from 0 deg (the bottom) to 85 deg (near the equator) at three intervals: 10 deg (0 to 10 deg), 5 deg (10 to 55 deg), and 2.5 deg (55 to 85 deg) near the outer (1.5 mm) and inner (5 mm) surfaces of the test section. The angular film-boiling heat fluxes and heat transfer coefficients were obtained from the two-dimensional transient temperature profiles by solving a transient heat conduction equation in spherical coordinates. The test results were compared with those of the laminar and interfacial wavy film-boiling analysis. Undulating heat transfer coefficients were observed from the experimental data as the angle increases. These phenomena intensified near the equator, which has higher inclination angles than near the bottom. It was shown that the Helmholtz instability limited the vapor film thickness. In addition, the boiling mechanism on the downward-facing hemisphere was visualized utilizing a digital camera.