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.
Akio Yamamoto, Masayuki Toujou, Kentarou Komori, Yasunori Kitamura, Yoshihiro Yamane
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 3 | June 2006 | Pages 318-327
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, new optimization algorithms for the in-core fuel shuffling sequence of a boiling water reactor (BWR) are proposed to reduce outage time. During the short outage of a BWR, fuel shuffling can be a critical path in the periodic overall plant inspection. Therefore, a reduction in operation time for in-core fuel shuffling is essential to improve the plant capacity factor. For BWR in-core fuel shuffling, the shuffling sequence should be selected carefully since a fuel shuffling operation may affect those following it. Furthermore, several constraints must be satisfied during the in-core fuel shuffling of a BWR; e.g., two fuel assemblies must be inserted diagonally in a cell to fix the position of a control blade in it. Therefore, it is difficult to optimize BWR in-core fuel shuffling. In order to resolve this issue, new optimization methods are proposed, and the performances of some optimization algorithms are compared. Test calculations in actual BWR plants reveal that the workload for in-core fuel shuffling can be reduced by the proposed methods. The results of this paper will contribute to increasing the plant capacity factor by reducing the outage time.