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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.
Sang Won Lee, Han Gon Kim, Seung Jong Oh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 3 | June 2007 | Pages 396-407
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3850
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
APR1400 is an evolutionary pressurized water reactor developed in Korea. The emergency core cooling system (ECCS) of APR1400 has been improved by adopting an independent four-train safety injection system. Each train is composed of a safety injection pump and an accumulator with a fluidic device, the passive flow rate controlling equipment. Also, ECCS water is injected directly into the reactor vessel upper downcomer, ~2 m above the cold-leg centerline. With these design characteristics, more complex thermal-hydraulic phenomena can be observed in a large-break loss-of-coolant accident (LBLOCA) scenario. In this paper, the effects of these design characteristics on the LBLOCA scenario are examined using the RELAP5/MOD3.3 code. The code modeling capability in predicting the phenomena important to APR1400 ECCS design is examined using available experiments. It shows that RELAP5/MOD3.3 conservatively predicts the bypass rate and downcomer boiling phenomena. RELAP5/MOD3.3 code analysis of APR1400 LBLOCA with conservative assumptions show that ECCS design is adequate and there is no degradation of core cooling capability and reheat phenomena during the late reflood phase. All fuel rods are quenched in the early reflood phase when the fluidic devices are inactive, showing the effectiveness of the direct vessel injection and fluidic devices against an APR1400 LBLOCA scenario.