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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.
Michitsugu Mori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 2 | November 1999 | Pages 205-215
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3025
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) has ten reactor-internal pumps peripherally mounted on the bottom of a reactor vessel. Analytical simulation of reactor-internal pumps unique to the ABWR requires new modeling because of the difference in core flow characteristics between the reactor-internal pumps and the two external-recirculation pumps of the primary outer loops with the jet pumps in a current boiling water reactor. Efforts in this work focused on modeling and simulation of reactor-internal pumps and core flow of the ABWR, using the RETRAN-3D code, the computer program for transient thermal-hydraulic analysis of a complex fluid flow system, without multidimensional kinetics. Included are modeling of the core and reactor pressure vessel with ten reactor-internal pumps, and simulation of the events of reactor-internal-pumps trip during the startup-phase tests, which are unable to be done in the simulation of a current BWR. Sensitivity analyses on the recirculation flow control and the slip model were also performed. The predictions by the RETRAN-3D code successfully tracked the measured data of reactor-internal-pump trip during the startup-phase test. The present analytical simulations could demonstrate the validation of the RETRAN-3D code applicable to the ABWR with the pump model of reactor-internal pumps in the program.