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.
Shawn P. Burns, Dale E. Klein
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 2 | November 1993 | Pages 157-163
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Waste Management / Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34879
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The TEXSAN thermal-hydraulic analysis program was developed to simulate buoyancy-driven fluid flow and heat transfer in spent-fuel and high-level nuclear waste (HLW) shipping applications. The TEXSAN design has sufficient flexibility to conduct full cask analysis as well as small-scale heat and mass transfer simulations on a rod-to-rod basis within an individual fuel assembly. As part of the TEXSAN software quality assurance program, the software has been subjected to a series of test cases intended to validate its capabilities. The validation tests include many physical phenomena that arise in spent-fuel and HLW shipping applications. Some of the principal results of the TEXSAN validation tests are described, and they are compared with solutions available in the open literature. The TEXSAN validation effort has shown that the TEXSAN program is stable and consistent under a range of operating conditions and provides accuracy comparable with other heat transfer programs and evaluation techniques. The modeling capabilities and the interactive user interface employed by the TEXSAN program should make it a useful tool in HLW transportation analysis.