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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.
Lloyd B. Thomas, Sudarshan K. Loyalka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | May 1982 | Pages 213-219
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A26283
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Estimation of gap conductance in nuclear reactor fuel rods requires values for thermal accommodation coefficients of several gases on Zircaloy, uranium-dioxide, stainless steel, and other surfaces. These values for Zircaloy-2 have now been obtained by observing cooling rates of a Zircaloy sphere suspended in the several gases. These measurements are on so-called engineering surfaces, and no special attempt other than baking under high vacuum pumping was used to clean the surfaces. It is found, however, that if the recent kinetic theory results of Cercignani and Pagani on heat transfer from a sphere are used, then quite constant values for accommodation coefficients on a range of pressures are obtained.