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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.
Takeshi Tsukada, Keiju Takahashi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 2 | May 2008 | Pages 229-243
Technical Paper | First International Pyroprocessing Research Conference | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3951
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pyrometallugical reprocessing, the spent electrorefiner salt containing fission product (FP) elements may be purified by zeolite and reused. Batch-type absorption tests were conducted using one or two FP chlorides in a LiCl-KCl eutectic electrolyte in order to obtain absorption isotherms to fit to a Langmuir equation model. For the trivalent FP elements in the one-component or two-component systems, the FP-element uptake in the zeolite can be related to its concentration in the salt using a single Langmuir-type equation. In contrast, for monovalent and divalent FP elements, it was necessary to use three different Langmuir-type equations. Using these derived absorption equations and a stage concentration diagram, it was found that only a three-stage process is required to attain a decontamination factor of 50 for trivalent FP elements via a countercurrent multistage process.