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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.
T. Shimooke
Nuclear Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 257-272
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT71-A30958
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Various core performances, such as power and void distributions in a core, reactivity change, and shifts of control rods, are predicted for the JPDR-1 in a three-dimensional framework by means of the one-energy-group coarse-mesh approximation of the boiling water reactor (BWR) core. The predictions are checked in detail with experimental data that were accumulated by “the core-performance assessment experiments” done throughout the life of the JPDR-1 core. The data include y-probing data of the core at the exposure of each 1000 MWd/ton (approximately) core outlet void fractions measured directly by voidmeters, logbook records of the control rod patterns, heat-balance data for the precise core outputs, and others. In conclusion, the one-energy-group coarse-mesh approximation of the BWR is proved to be satisfactory for describing the global core performances of the JPDR-1 for burnup cases. The global power distributions can be calculated, e.g., with 4% standard deviation in the channel power sharing, and this is accurate enough to predict the core reactivity within 0.3% Δk/k error at 6000-MWd/ton exposure. The observed discrepancy, 0.9% Δk/k in the core reactivity at 6000-MWd/ton exposure (i.e., 10 to 15% error of the burnup change of reactivity), is discussed, with the final suggestion that the local power and exposure distribution in a core should be studied first, among others, for better achievement of the global core description.