Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

The Safest Nuclear Energy Source #nuclear #science #tech

4 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:02

In this segment of the video, the speakers explain why TRISO (TRIstructural-ISOtropic) fuel particles are considered a "functional containment" that dramatically reduces the potential release of radioactivity in severe accidents, allowing reactor site boundaries to be placed closer to the plant. Speaker B contrasts this safety profile with conventional light‑water reactors (LWRs), citing the Fukushima disaster as an example of the risks associated with LWRs, and emphasizes that reactors using TRISO fuel are fundamentally incapable of experiencing similar catastrophic releases. Speaker C describes the practical challenge of turning loose TRISO particles—essentially a jar of tiny beads—into usable fuel forms, mentioning that multiple traditional fabrication methods exist to create simple or complex fuel element geometries.

The important thing about triso particles is it's considered what's called a functional containment. When you look at a large commercial reactor, normally you drive by on the road and you see a fence that's a long way from the reactor. Now, in these reactors, the site boundary can be closer because the amount of activity that you would release during a severe accident is much lower.
A typical light water reactor, there's 90 or so operating around the US. Severe accidents for those can be bad. We know about Fukushima. The reactors that use TRISO fuel are really incapable, as a function of their design, of having an accident like that. Once finally you have TRISO particles and they're ready to go into their final fuel form, you can make simple shapes like that. You can also make shapes like this. So you could put TRISO particles in here and make a very complex fuel element.
So if you've seen the TRISO particles, it's just a big jar of very, very tiny loose particles. So you have to make a fuel form out of that, right? And there's a couple of different methods to use traditionally. Hi.