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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.
M. Azam, R. S. Gowda, S. Ganesan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 3 | March 2006 | Pages 320-324
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2586
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relative differential cross section for testing the validity of the Ramsauer model was previously introduced by Azam and Gowda. This quantity for intermediate energy neutron scattering processes is independent of the details of nuclear interaction and depends only on nuclear radius as a parameter. In this paper we use this quantity to predict the neutron total and differential shape-elastic cross sections. We show that, given the radius parameter, by making a measurement of the differential cross section at one angle, the total shape-elastic cross section (and hence the reaction cross section if the total cross section is known) can be determined to a good degree of accuracy. The forward-angle differential shape-elastic cross section is also well predicted. The method is of very general applicability and will be most useful in those situations where model-based fits to these quantities either do not exist or are unreliable for extrapolation/interpolation.