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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.
J. M. Cardito, E. V. Somers, J. H. McWhirter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 28 | Number 1 | January 1976 | Pages 119-126
Technical Paper | Fuels for Pulsed Reactor / Reactor Siting | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The containment capability of mined subterranean caverns for siting nuclear power plants depends on the flow of groundwater through porous media surrounding the cavern. For a simple cylindrical containment cavern, design correlations were developed relating depth of burial to cavern overpressure. Considering 50 psig as the maximum containment overpressure following a postulated loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), the minimum depth of burial below the groundwater table for a cavern of 50-ft radius is ∼200 ft. These conditions assure no cavern water flow through the rock to the atmosphere and no cavern contaminant seepage into the groundwater following a postulated LOCA.