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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.
R. W. Ostensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 1979 | Pages 301-313
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A19219
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a core disruptive accident in a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, rearrangement of core materials may lead to a prompt critical excursion. Damage to the primary containment, especially the head seals and head bolts, caused by the subsequent core disassembly is a primary concern of hypothetical accident analysis. A systematic study has been performed to evaluate the sensitivity of that damage in a commercial size reactor to various uncertainties. The damage is very insensitive to the equation-of-state of the fuel but highly sensitive to the reactivity ramp rate through prompt critical. From the point of view of vessel damage calculations, these results indicate that there is little incentive to improve our equation-of-state data on unirradiated mixed-oxide fuel.