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 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
X-energy forms partnership with Talen Energy to assess Xe-100 deployment
X-energy announced Thursday that it has signed a letter of intent with Talen Energy to assess the deployment of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactor in Pennsylvania and throughout the market area of the PJM Interconnection regional transmission organization. That area, where the companies intend to explore the deployment of at least three four-unit Xe-100 power plants, includes several states in the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Illinois.
Diego Mandelli, Carlo Parisi, Nolan Anderson, Zhegang Ma, Hongbin Zhang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 389-405
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1794234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accident tolerant fuels (ATFs) are new nuclear fuels developed in response to the accident at the Fukushima power station in March 2011. The goal of ATFs is to withstand accident scenarios through better performance compared to currently employed fuels (e.g., small-scale hydrogen generation). This paper targets a method for evaluating and comparing ATF performance from a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) perspective by employing a newly developed combination of event trees and dynamic PRA methods. Compared to classical PRA methods based on event trees and fault trees, dynamic PRA can evaluate with higher resolution the safety impacts of physics dynamics and the timing/sequencing of events on the accident progression without the need to introduce overly conservative modeling assumptions and success criteria. In this paper, we analyze the impact on the accident progression of three different cladding configurations for two initiating events [a large break loss-of-coolant accident (LB-LOCA) and a station blackout (SBO)] by employing dynamic PRA methods. The goal is to compare the safety performance of ATFs (FeCrAl and Cr-coated cladding) and the currently employed Zr-based clad fuel. We employ two different strategies. The first focuses on the identification of success criteria discrepancies between the accident sequences generated by the classical PRA model and the set of simulation runs generated by dynamic PRA using ATF. The second one, on the other hand, directly uses dynamic PRA to evaluate the impact of timing of events (e.g., recovery actions) on accident progression. By applying these methods to the LB-LOCA and SBO initiating events, we show how dynamic PRA methods can provide analysts with detailed and quantitative information on the safety impact of ATFs.