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 Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
September 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
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.
Yasuhide Senda, Seiji Shiroya, Masatoshi Hayashi, Keiji Kanda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | September 1985 | Pages 318-334
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A15959
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of analyses on the void reactivity measurements performed in the Kyoto University Critical Assembly using medium-enriched uranium fuel as well as highly enriched uranium fuel are provided. In consideration of the heterogeneity of a complex core, four-group constants were generated by SRAC, a standard thermal reactor code system for reactor design and analysis at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The eigenvalue and perturbation calculations were subsequently performed by the 2D-FEM-KUR code, which is a two-dimensional diffusion code based on the finite element method. The calculated eigenvalue keff agreed with the measured value to within 0.5% in the calculated-to-experiment ratio. The void reactivity calculated by perturbation theory approximately reproduced the experimental data including the spatial dependence. The discrepancy between the calculated and measured void reactivity was <0.05 × 10−3 Δ k / k per voided flow channel.