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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.
Michael K. Meeks, Michael C. Baker, Riccardo Bonazza
Nuclear Technology | Volume 129 | Number 1 | January 2000 | Pages 69-81
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3046
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments were performed to determine the likelihood of a vapor explosion when injecting an inert gas (nitrogen) and a coolant (water) into a pool of molten metal (tin) in a large-scale chamber (~20 kg fuel). The injection flow rates of the water and nitrogen gas were the principal experimental variables, with average water flow rates up to 0.05 × 10-3 m3/s and gas flow rates ranging from 0.33 × 10-3 to 1.67 × 10-3 m3/s. Of 35 successful experiments, 11 resulted in an explosive interaction, as determined by audible signals, videotape, and accelerometer data. The main objective of the investigation was to determine the existence of a boundary between explosive and nonexplosive regions in the water-gas flow rate plane: Such a boundary was indeed identified and approximated by a straight line. Two experiments in which explosive interactions were obtained in the low water/gas flow regions after a relatively long time of coolant injection (~5 to 10 s) demonstrate the hitherto undervalued importance of the temporal variable.