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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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.
Thomas J. Downar, Jen-Ying Wu, John Steill, Raghunandan Janardhan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 117 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 133-150
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-fidelity simulation of nuclear reactor accidents such as the rupture of a main steam line in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) requires three-dimensional core hydrodynamics modeling because of the strong effect channel cross flow has on reactor kinetics. A parallel nested Krylov linear solver was developed and implemented in the RETRAN-03 reactor systems analysis code to make such high-fidelity core modeling practical on engineering workstations. Domain decomposition techniques were also applied to the RETRAN-03 solution algorithm and demonstrated using a distributed memory parallel computer. Applications were performed for a four-loop Westinghouse PWR steam-line-break accident, and performance improvements of over a factor of 30 were achieved for models with 25 flow channels in the core. Larger models (e.g., 104-core channels), previously inaccessible because of memory limitations, were also solved with practical execution times.