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.
Peter K. Mast, James H. Scott
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 3 | December 1979 | Pages 600-605
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32371
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new fuel pin failure model, the Los Alamos Failure Model (LAFM), based on a linear life fraction rule failure criterion, has been developed to provide a reliable and inexpensive prediction of the time and axial location of liquid-metal fast breeder reactor fuel pin failure in a hypothetical transient overpower (TOP) accident. Code testing analyses for a number of TOP Transient Reactor Test Facility tests have resulted in excellent agreement between calculated and observed pin failure time and location. Because of the nature of the failure criterion used, the code has also been used to investigate the extent of cladding damage incurred in terminated as well as unterminated TOP transients in the fast test reactor. The results of these analyses show that 3 dollar/s and 50 and 5 cent/s transients terminated by the secondary trip point (25% overpower) result in negligible calculated cladding damage.