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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.
Soo-Youl Oh, Jonghwa Chang, Jong-Kyun Park, Manuel Carrasco
Nuclear Technology | Volume 134 | Number 2 | May 2001 | Pages 196-207
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New core control logic known as Mode K has been developed to enhance the load-follow operation (LFO) capability of a pressurized water reactor. The Mode K reactor regulating system, which actuates control bank movements, consists of two closed control loops, one for the coolant average temperature control and the other for the axial power shape control. Via its peculiar logic for selecting the control banks to be driven, the Mode K controls the coolant average temperature and axial power shape simultaneously and automatically within their allowed operating limits. In this way, the Mode K significantly reduces the operator burden associated with conventional manual power shape control during LFOs. A simple and flexible soluble boron scenario complements the Mode K logic and contributes toward reducing operational burden by its simplicity. The Mode K logic has been implanted in the Korean Next-Generation Reactor, a 1300-MW(electric) class evolutionary nuclear power plant under development in Korea, and various kinds of LFOs including frequency control have been simulated using the Framatome engineering simulator SAPHIR. The simulation results show reasonable core control performance of the Mode K as well as proper behaviors of other major nuclear steam supply system components such as the pressurizer and steam generator.