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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.
G. W. McNair, K. L. Peddicord
Nuclear Technology | Volume 40 | Number 3 | October 1978 | Pages 306-314
Technical Paper | Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT78-A26728
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method is presented to calculate two-dimensional temperature profiles in fuel pins with eccentrically placed fuel pellets. This is implemented in a finite difference program. By requiring continuity of the radial and angular components of the heat flux vector across the gas gap, an angular-dependent thermal conductivity is derived to account for the eccentric condition. The method is compared with another approach in which the fuel pellet surface is approximated by a “ratchet” boundary. Similar results for temperatures were obtained from both calculations, but the “modeled conductivity” method presented here showed significant gains in computing time and storage requirements.