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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.
Gabriel F. Cuevas Vivas, Yassin A. Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 127 | Number 3 | September 1999 | Pages 287-300
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3002
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of the simplified boiling water reactor (SBWR) is carried out using the reactor analysis computer program RAMONA-4B in an operational transient scenario, a turbine trip with failure of all the bypass valves. The SBWR model represents the vessel's internal components, such as flow areas, diameters, and volumes. The one-quarter-core neutron parameters are calculated with the CASMO-3 transport theory lattice physics computer program. The three-dimensional representation of the reactor core uses some standard fuel design parameters, such as a wide central water rod, 8 x 8 lattice, gadolinium rods, etc. The thermal-hydraulic equations are solved with the RAMONA-4B computer program in a closed loop inside the reactor vessel and in 184 parallel channels (including bypass) in the core.Finally, the two-phase coolant and neutronic parameters are calculated in steady state and during the turbine trip transient. The results obtained compare favorably with the standard safety analysis report data.