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.
Woan Hwang, Ho Chun Suk, Won Mok Jae
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 3 | September 1991 | Pages 314-324
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comprehensive fission gas release model is developed by considering the behavior of multiple bubble sizes on the fuel grain boundary in terms of relevant physical parameters. This model takes into account bubble migration and coalescence; critical bubble size, which depends on the thermal gradient on the grain boundary; and the lenticular shape of the bubbles. Booth’s classical diffusion theory is directly adopted in the modeling of intragranular fission gas behavior. To consider the bubble drift due to the thermal gradient, those bubbles that exceed the critical bubble size are assumed to be left on the grain boundary and to migrate along the thermal gradient until they encounter free voidages. Use of this model in the KAFEPA code, which predicts the absolute magnitude and the trend of the gas release depending on power history, gives better agreement with the experimental data than the predictions of the model in the ELESIM code, which considers only a single bubble size at the grain boundary.