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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.
Ki Yong Choi, Hyun Sik Park, Seok Cho, Kyoung Ho Kang, Nam Hyun Choi, Won Pil Baek, Yeon Sik Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 3 | September 2011 | Pages 604-618
Technical Paper | NURETH-13 Special / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12509
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The direct vessel injection (DVI)-adopted power plant APR1400 considers a DVI line break among the analyzed small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in safety analysis. The first-ever integral effects test database for various DVI line break sizes from 5% to 100% was established with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute's Advanced Thermal-Hydraulic Test Loop for Accident Simulation (ATLAS) test facility. This database enhances our physical understanding of the major thermal-hydraulic behaviors of the APR1400 during DVI line break accidents, and it can also be used to examine the prediction capabilities and identify any deficiencies in the existing best-estimate safety analysis codes. Effects of the break size were experimentally investigated, and the best-estimated MARS code was assessed against the experimental database. On the whole, the prediction of the MARS code shows a good agreement with the measured data. However, the code predicted a higher core level than the data just before a loop seal clearing occurs, and it also produced a more rapid decrease in the downcomer water level than the data. These disagreements are the expected consequence of uncertainties in predicting countercurrent flow or condensation phenomena in a downcomer region. The present integral effects test data will be used to support the present conservative safety analysis methodology and to develop a new best-estimate safety analysis methodology on the DVI line break accidents of the APR1400.