ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Temitope A. Taiwo, Taek K. Kim, Roald A. Wigeland
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 2 | May 2016 | Pages 127-135
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-119
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As part of a nuclear fuel cycle evaluation and screening (E&S) study, widely ranging thorium fuel cycle options were evaluated, and their performance characteristics and challenges to implementation were compared to those of other nuclear fuel cycle options based on criteria specified by the Nuclear Energy Office of the U.S. Department of Energy. The evaluated nuclear fuel cycles included the once-through, limited, and continuous recycle options using critical or externally driven nuclear energy systems. The E&S study found that the continuous recycle of 233U/Th in fuel cycles using either thermal or fast reactors is an attractive promising fuel cycle option with high effective fuel resource utilization and low waste generation, but they did not perform quite as well as the continuous recycle of Pu/U using a fast critical system, which was identified as one of the most promising fuel cycle options in the E&S study. This is because compared to their uranium counterparts, the thorium-based systems tended to have higher radioactivity in the short term (~100 years postirradiation), because of differences in the fission product yield curves, and in the long term (100 000 years postirradiation), because of the decay of 233U and daughters, and because of higher mass flow rates due to lower discharge burnups. Some of the thorium-based systems also require enriched uranium support, which tends to be detrimental to resource utilization and waste generation metrics. Finally, similar to the need to develop recycle fuel fabrication, fuels separations, and fast reactors for the most promising options using Pu/U recycle, the future thorium-based fuel cycle options with continuous recycle would also require such capabilities; however, their deployment challenges are expected to be greater since past development of such facilities has not reached a comparable level of maturity.
