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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.
N. R. Chellew, W. E. Miller, R. W. Kessie, C. C. McPheeters, P. A. Nelson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 21 | Number 2 | February 1974 | Pages 125-132
Technical Paper | Instrument | doi.org/10.13182/NT74-A31368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Work has been completed to demonstrate the feasibility of a new cladding-failure monitoring technique based on determination of the 135I content of the primary sodium coolant of Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBRs). The method was devised to aid in detecting the penetration of fuel element cladding by sodium coolant. The method consists of isolating a small volume of primary sodium, sparging it with an inert gas to strip out dissolved gases which are discarded, further sparging the sample to strip 135mXe produced by 135I decay, and calculating the 135I content of the sodium from the 135mXe content of the second sparge. A sparging monitor was built and tested to determine the time required to sparge dissolved radioxenon (133Xe) from molten sodium. This time varied from ∼1 to 1.5 min, depending on experimental conditions. For the calculated background level of 135I in the primary sodium of Experimental Breeder Reactor II, a counting time of ∼2 min would be required to determine the amount of 135mXe removed by the second sparging to a 1σ counting precision of ±4%. A shorter counting time would be required for higher 135mXe levels that would occur during fuel failure. A system with automatic controls was designed for monitoring 135I in the primary sodium of an LMFBR.