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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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August 2026
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LLNL, Ampera partner to develop thorium-based TRISO fuel
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has formed a strategic partnership with Ampera to develop the company’s nuclear fuel concept through a project named THUNDER, for Thorium Unimodal Droplet Ejection for Reactors.
The focus of THUNDER is fabricating TRISO made with kernels of thorium rather than the usual uranium. LLNL and Ampera will evaluate and optimize liquid metal–jetting technology to produce highly uniform, spherical kernels of thorium-232 for later processing into TRISO fuel.
Technical Session|Space Nuclear Propulsion
Wednesday, May 7, 2025|3:15–4:55PM CDT|Salon EF (Marriott)
Session Chair:
Elora Kurz (NASA Langley Research Center)
Track Organizer:
Harold Gerrish (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center)
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Assessment of Reduced Order Thermal Modeling Assumptions for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
3:15–3:40PM CDT
Corey Smith (AMA), Jacob Stonehill (AMA), Daria Nikitaeva (AMA), Matthew Duchek (AMA)
Paper
A Preliminary Computational Thermal Model of the Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket
3:40–4:05PM CDT
Nicholas DeFranzo (Univ. Rhode Island), Bahram Nassersharif (Univ. Rhode Island)
Verification of a Reduced-Order, Thermal-Hydraulic Code Using Higher-Order Analysis Tools
4:05–4:30PM CDT
Jonathon Thomsen (Georgia Tech), Camden Eck (Georgia Tech), Dan Kotlyar (Georgia Tech)
Ensemble Kalman Smoothing for Estimating Unknown Heat Source in a Transient Thermal System
4:30–4:55PM CDT
Haeseong Kim (MIT), Sacit M. Cetiner (INL), Arunkumar Seshadri (MIT), Matteo Bucci (MIT)