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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.
S. David Sevougian, Vivek Jain, Robert J. MacKinnon, Patrick D. Mattie, Kevin G. Mon, Bryan E. Bullard
Nuclear Technology | Volume 163 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 92-100
Technical Paper | High-Level Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3973
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A total system performance assessment (TSPA) model has been developed to analyze the ability of the natural and engineered barriers of the Yucca Mountain repository to isolate nuclear waste over the period following repository closure. The principal features of the engineered barrier system are emplacement tunnels (or "drifts") containing a two-layer waste package (WP) for waste containment and a titanium drip shield to protect the WP from seeping water and falling rock. The 25-mm-thick outer shell of the WP is composed of Alloy 22, a highly corrosion-resistant nickel-based alloy. There are five nominal degradation modes of the Alloy 22: general corrosion, microbially influenced corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, early failure due to manufacturing defects, and localized corrosion (LC). This paper specifically examines the incorporation of the Alloy 22 LC model into the Yucca Mountain TSPA model, particularly the abstraction and modeling methodology, as well as issues dealing with scaling, spatial variability, uncertainty, and coupling to other submodels that are part of the total system model, such as the submodel for seepage water chemistry.