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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.
Raymond C. Wang, Yunlin Xu, Nathanael Hudson, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 504-514
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III (SPERT III) was a series of reactivity insertion experiments conducted in the 1950s. This paper describes the validation of the U.S. NRC coupled code system TRITON/PARCS/TRACE to simulate reactivity insertion accidents (RIA) using several of the SPERT III tests. The NRC coupled code system was used to perform the SPERT III E-Core configuration tests in which the RIA was initiated by the rapid ejection of a central cruciform control rod. The resulting superprompt reactivity excursion and negative Doppler reactivity feedback produced the familiar bell-shaped power increase and decrease. The energy deposition during such a power excursion has important safety consequences, and the SPERT III tests provide a validation basis for the NRC coupled multiphysics codes. The models were developed using the original experiment documentation, and the results of five separate tests were used to validate the TRITON/PARCS/TRACE coupled code system.