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.
Jim P. Wei
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | November 1979 | Pages 44-52
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simplified interassembly heat transfer model has been developed to satisfy liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core restraint system analysis needs that explicitly treats steady-state intra-assembly and interassembly heat transfer in core assemblies. The intra-assembly heat transfer inside reactor assemblies is modeled based on application of the subchannel concept together with the use of bulk parameters for coolant velocity and coolant temperature within a subchannel. The model utilizes a tri-grid system to treat interassembly heat transfer between assemblies. Because of this special nodal scheme, a set of finite difference equations, derived from the energy equation for all the subchannels, duct wall, and gap flow, is actually a rather special system of simultaneous linear algebraic equations which have a tri-diagonal matrix form. Due to this special form, an efficient method of solution for computers is used without matrix elimination and inversion. Although this model was developed for core restraint applications, it is also well suited for the determination of core-wide coolant temperature distributions.