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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.
Stojan Petelin, Borut Mavko, Bostjan Koncar, Yassin A. Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 1 | April 2007 | Pages 56-68
Technical Paper | Best Estimate Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3824
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper provides a scaling methodology that was applied for scaling of the BETHSY integral test facility to the real nuclear power plant (NPP). The similarity of physical phenomena between the BETHSY experimental facility and the scaled-up model (representation of the real NPP) was analyzed on the small-break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA) scenario. A comprehensive numerical analysis using the RELAP5 thermal-hydraulic code was performed to evaluate the optimal scaling-up of the BETHSY facility to the real NPP. In order to investigate the phenomenological scaling-up basis, two enlarged RELAP5 input models were constructed, differing in scaling criteria for the primary cooling system: proportional volume scaling and scaling based on the Froude number. A better agreement with the physical phenomena of the SBLOCA experiment was achieved in the case of proportional volume scaling. In addition, scaling of heat structures was also analyzed. It was shown that the best predictions of the transient phenomena were obtained when the heat structures were scaled according to the tensile stress criterion.