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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.
Tetsuo Sawada, Hisashi Ninokata, Hirofumi Tomozoe, Hiroshi Endo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 3 | June 2000 | Pages 242-251
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT130-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An outline is given of simple evaluation models for a recriticality in an attempt to construct a fast reactor core that has high potential to terminate an accident and prevent its progression, under postulated core-damage conditions, into further disruption of the degraded core and into possible recriticality leading to an energetic power excursion. The basic idea to prevent recriticality events is to remove a certain amount of fuel material out of the core in order to keep the core subcritical. Based on the simplified models, general guidelines are given that minimize the amount of fuel removal necessary to avoid recriticality events. Multigroup two-dimensional diffusion calculations are also performed to ascertain the tendency obtained by the simple model for the reactivity insertion due to a core collapse. In the sense of controlled material relocation, the fraction of core materials is identified that should be preferentially removed out of the core to eliminate the recriticality potential.