ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Jonathan L. Barthle, Isabelle O. Lindsay, Nader Satvat, Nicholas R. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 3 | March 2026 | Pages 632-652
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2494290
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The focus of this study is to perform an in-depth analysis of a potential power-cooling mismatch within a Pebble Bed Fluoride-salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor (PB-FHR). The postulated transient that was chosen was an overcooling accident, which can be caused by an increase in heat removal from the primary system. The PB-FHR system that was selected for this study was the Kairos Power generic Fluoride-salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor (gFHR), which is free of proprietary information and encourages modeling and collaboration across multiple institutions. Overcooling is of interest in the gFHR because a decrease in coolant temperature can have significant impacts on the system because of reactivity feedback. Changes in power and fuel temperature need to be investigated to determine how the fuel will respond with respect to fuel performance. Therefore, this study will generate thermal-hydraulic boundary conditions and perform a Sobol sensitivity study to observe the power and temperature behavior during the transient, as well as what parameters had the most impact on the key figures of merit. It was found that the change in the inlet coolant temperature during the transient had significant impact on the total power, while the nominal coolant inlet temperature and the effective thermal conductivity of the fuel region heavily impacted fuel temperatures. The peak power reached about 465 MW(thermal) (66% increase from nominal), and the temperature increase did not exceed 955°C for the fuel, which is lower than a given 1650°C safety limit for TRistructural ISOtropic (TRISO) particle fuel. To investigate the fuel behavior during the transient, the thermal-hydraulic boundary conditions were exported to a one-dimensional BISON model that tested the failure probability of the SiC layer. Under these conditions, the maximum principal stress of the SiC layer reached 1.27 and the overall failure probability of the SiC layer was 8.5 × 10−9. It was concluded that the fuel was not challenged during this transient and helped to demonstrate the robustness of the TRISO fuel form and the inherent safety features of the gFHR.