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.
Seihiro Itoya, F. D. Shum, Jun-Ichiro Otonari, Hideo Nagasaka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | March 1988 | Pages 349-359
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34059
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) is designed to represent the next generation of boiling water reactors (BWRs), to be introduced into commercial operation in the 1990s. The response of the ABWR to loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCAs) was simulated in the full integral simulation test (FIST)-ABWR test facility. However, the emergency core cooling system structure was somewhat different from the current ABWR design. The LOCA experimental results of FIST-ABWR showed that a core was completely covered by a two-phase mixture and cooled by natural circulation without any rod heatup. The SAFER03 computer code has a newly developed evaluation model for the analysis of BWR LOCAs. SAFER03 analyses with the FIST-ABWR test data were performed to assess its ability to predict thermal-hydraulic responses for various postulated break locations in an ABWR. The analytical results indicate that SAFER03 accurately predicted pressure history, down-comer level response, and key phenomena, such as no core uncovery and no rod heatup. Consequently, it was confirmed that SAFER03 is applicable for ABWR LOCA analyses.