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.
Werner Maschek, Margaret W. Asprey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | November 1983 | Pages 330-336
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33291
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The behavior of a homogeneous reactor core of the 300-MW(electric) class has been evaluated during the pretransition and transition phases of a hypothetical loss-of-flow accident without scram. The SIMMER-II code has been used to track core material redistribution processes, which can lead to recriticalities and secondary nuclear power excursions. One of the key questions of core disruptive accident analysis is if core meltdown inevitably leads to a bottled-up core situation with its energetics potential or if various phenomena exist (as material discharge of hot fuel through the axial blankets, drop-in of blanket material into the core region, etc.) that prevent the accident progression into a bottled-up transition phase pool. The analyses for the specified reactor design show that, taking into account the aforementioned phenomena, the dominant accident path will lead to the postaccident heat removal phase directly from the pretransition phase. The accident path into the transition phase with a bottled-up core situation and its energetics potential might thereby be avoided.