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Conference Spotlight
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. A. Gaafer, L. Mango, + F. V. Orestano,†, F. Pistella
Nuclear Technology | Volume 27 | Number 2 | October 1975 | Pages 187-206
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT75-A24286
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Methods have been formulated to treat the rod cluster control for present-generation presurized water reactors within the computational codes available at Comitato Nazionale per l’Energia Nucleare (CNEN) for light water reactors. The reliability of these procedures has been verified by comparing the calculated results with the most significant experimental data available from measurements performed by the Centre d’Étude de l’Énergie Nucléaire-Studiecentrum Voor Kernenergie (Belgian Plutonium Recycling Program), Babcock & Wilcox (Lumped Burnable Poison Program), Westinghouse, and CNEN (Italian Nuclear Ship Propulsion Program). Reactivity and power distributions have been evaluated for a wide set of experimental configurations including several types of absorbing rods (e.g., B4C, Pyrex, and Ag-In-Cd alloy) with different radii in different lattices made of various fuel materials (e.g., UO2, PuO2, and UO2/PuO2).
