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.
Nikolai B. Mikheev, Sergei A. Kulyukhin, Alla N. Kamenskaya, Igor’ A. Rumer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 1 | April 1996 | Pages 77-83
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Increasing the safety of nuclear power plants is a problem of the utmost importance in the nuclear energy industry. Particular attention is given to severe accidents at nuclear reactors. Although the probability of these accidents is low (<10−5), their consequences are the most disastrous. Severe accidents result in the release of tens of thousands of curies of radioactive products into the area under the containment. Modern protective systems for the localization of radioactive aerosols and volatile radionuclides are based mainly on the filtration of gas flow, using various solid and liquid sorbents. The main principle of these filters is based on the precipitation of suspended particles on any surface (grids, liquid drops, or film, fiber, and electrode surfaces). In these processes, physical phenomena such as gravitation, inertia, diffusion, electricity, magnetism, and supersonics are used. A disadvantage of the available systems is that they may not trap radioaerosols present in the vapor-gas mixture in the form of finely dispersed (much smaller than 0.1 µm) hydrophobic particles. A new concept of protection from radioaerosols and volatile radionuclides has been suggested. A basically new method of the localization of radioactive aerosols and volatile radionuclides is based on the physicochemical process occurring in the gas phase. The proposed concept of protection from radioaerosols and volatile fission products uses unconventional approaches based not on the filtration of vapor-gas flow but on the extraction of radioaerosols and radioiodine from them by the formation of mixed micelles with manufactured hydrophilic aerosols, such as MoO3 and NH4CI-(NH4)2SO3, and the cocrystallization of ionic iodine with them. The new concept may be used for protection from radioaerosols at various types of nuclear reactors.