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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.
Sung Jin Lee, Chan Y. Paik, Robert E. Henry, Michael Epstein, Martin G. Plys
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 2 | February 1999 | Pages 182-196
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Modular Accident Analysis Program Version 4 (MAAP4) is an integrated severe accident analysis code that integrates a large number of phenomena and models into a single plant simulation. MAAP4 was used to predict the containment response to a simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accident steam blowdown followed by the release of a hydrogen/helium gas mixture (test E11.2) in the decommissioned German Heiss Dampf Reaktor facility. The test also incorporated external spray cooling of the steel dome near the end of the transient. In MAAP4, 29 nodes and 44 flow junctions were used to model the highly compartmentalized containment. The MAAP4 prediction of the containment pressure and gas temperature over the duration of the transient and the transient distribution of hydrogen/helium in the containment compartments are compared with experimental results. MAAP4 overpredicts the pressure and correctly predicts the thermal and hydrogen stratification that was observed in the E11.2 test.