{
  "id": 14721424,
  "title": "Nuclear fuel company Clean Core says its thorium fuel cracks, swells less than uranium fuel",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/15/nuclear-fuel-company-clean-core-says-its-thorium-fuel-cracks-swells",
  "topic": "world",
  "section": "World",
  "published": "2026-10-15T14:54:13.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Indian Express",
    "slug": "the-indian-express",
    "url": "https://indianexpress.com/article/business/ccte-thorium-aneel-nuclear-fuel-inl-test-results-ntpc-10923468/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Clean Core, a Chicago-based nuclear fuel company, revealed that its advanced thorium-based fuel, ANEEL (Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life), exhibited significantly less cracking, fuel restructuring, and swelling compared to conventional uranium dioxide (UO₂) fuel during post-irradiation examinations at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials and Fuels Complex. ANEEL is a combination of thorium and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), a form of uranium with a higher concentration of uranium-235 than conventional low-enriched reactor fuel. The company is developing this fuel for pressurized heavy-water reactors (PHWRs). The research findings come from post-irradiation examinations of a medium-burnup batch of ANEEL fuel pellets after irradiation in INL’s Advanced Test Reactor. The ANEEL pellets achieved a burnup of over 45 gigawatt-days per metric tonne of uranium (GWd/MTU), indicating the amount of energy extracted from the fuel during irradiation. Additionally, the fuel pellets demonstrated favorable thermal-mechanical behavior under irradiation, with a volumetric power density of around 1,500 W/cm³ and a neutron flux of approximately 5 × 10¹⁴ n/cm²·s. Following irradiation, the fuel rodlets were transferred to INL’s Hot Fuel Examination Facility for non-destructive and destructive examinations. The results indicate a lack of gross fragmentation or adverse fuel-cladding or pellet-pellet interaction, as well as limited fuel restructuring and swelling, which provide encouraging evidence of favorable thermal-mechanical behavior under irradiation.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}