Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis supervisors, Professor Mujid S. Kazimi and Dr. Pavel Hejzlar for their guidance, help, and support throughout my stay at MIT. The help of Professor Michael J. Driscoll and Dr. Edward E. Pilat on various subjects covered in this thesis was invaluable and greatly appreciated. Special thanks to Professor Kenneth Czerwinski and Dr. Pradip Saha for their advice and insightful comments. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Mr. Dandong Feng in performing thermal hydraulic calculations with VIPRE computer code and the help of Dr. Zhiwen Xu and Dr. Yun Long on a variety of technical issues. Numerous discussions with my friends and colleagues Vaclav Dostal, Dr. Jacoppo Saccheri, Dr. Antonino Romano, and Pete Yarski, although not necessarily related to this thesis, comprised an essential part of its evolution. My studies at MIT would be impossible without countenance and encouragement of my former Professor Alex Galperin at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and Dr. Michael Todosow at Brookhaven National Laboratory who believed that I could make it from the very beginning. I dedicate this thesis to my wife Noga, and my children Netta and Yoav. I thank them all for their boundless love, support, and sacrifices that they made in all these years. I thank all my relatives and friends for their help and just for being there when I and my family needed them. This work was partially supported by the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory through the NERI and LDRD projects and by the Argonne National Laboratory through the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative project of the US DOE.
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