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.
D. Mandelli, C. Smith, T. Riley, J. Nielsen, A. Alfonsi, J. Cogliati, C. Rabiti, J. Schroeder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 161-174
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-142
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The existing fleet of nuclear power plants is in the process of having its lifetime extended and having the power generated from these plants increased via power uprates and improved operations. In order to evaluate the impact of these factors on the safety of the plant, the Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) pathway aims to provide insights to decision makers through a series of simulations of the plant dynamics for different initial conditions and accident scenarios. This paper presents a case study in order to show the capabilities of the RISMC methodology to assess the impact of power uprate of a boiling water reactor system during a station blackout accident scenario. We employ a system simulator code, RELAP5-3D, coupled with RAVEN, which performs the stochastic analysis. Our analysis is performed by (a) sampling values from a set of parameters from the uncertainty space of interest, (b) simulating the system behavior for that specific set of parameter values, and (c) analyzing the outcomes from the set of simulation runs.