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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.
Yuh Ming Ferng, Yung Shin Tseng, Bau Shei Pei, S. Long Wang, Chunkuan Shih, Tsun Fu Hung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 3 | June 2008 | Pages 308-322
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3958
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, possible influences of power uprate on the distribution characteristics of erosion-corrosion (E/C) wear sites were analyzed through proper two-phase models. These models include three-dimensional two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and appropriate E/C analysis. An analytical approach was applied to boiling water reactors. Based on the simulation results, the present CFD simulations successfully predicted two-phase phenomena that occurred in the piping system including centrifugal effects, gravitational effects, an imbalance of phase and mass separation in a T-junction, etc. When coupled with the calculated two-phase flow structures, the appropriate E/C models can be used to indicate the local distributions of severe E/C wear sites on the wall of the fittings. This shows a reasonable agreement with the plant-measured results. With these models, the impacts of power uprate on the distribution characteristics of E/C wear sites can be investigated. Comparisons between the calculated results for 100, 105, and 110% power levels clearly reveal that the power uprate has an insignificant effect on the distribution characteristics of wear sites for the selected piping system under investigation, especially in the wear ranges.