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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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.
Taisuke Yonomoto, Yutaka Kukita, Richard R. Schultz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 1 | October 1998 | Pages 18-30
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The passive residual heat removal (PRHR) system in the Westinghouse AP600 advanced passive reactor design is a natural-circulation-driven heat exchanger cooled by the water in the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST). During the experiments, which simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in the AP600 reactor using the ROSA-V Large-Scale Test Facility (LSTF), the PRHR system heat removal rates well exceeded the core decay power soon after the actuation of the PRHR. This resulted in continuous cooldown and depressurization of the primary side. The PRHR heat transfer performance in these experiments was analyzed by applying heat transfer correlations available in literature to the PRHR heat exchanger tube bundle. Also, the three-dimensional natural circulation in the IRWST was simulated numerically using the FLUENT code. The total heat transfer rate of the PRHR was predicted within 5% of the measured value. The fluid temperature distribution in the IRWST was also predicted well except that the elevation of the thermally stratified region was underpredicted. The calculated flow pattern in the IRWST suggests that the atypical IRWST geometry in the LSTF may have affected the PRHR heat transfer performance during the experiments only a little.