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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.
S. J. Hakim, T. H. Bauer, R. O. McNary
Nuclear Technology | Volume 52 | Number 1 | January 1981 | Pages 43-56
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT81-A32688
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Between the times of formation of molten pools of reactor materials and subsequent boilup, the radial progression of molten stagnant pools, i.e., crust growth and containment melting, is important to the further progress of a severe liquid-metal fast breeder reactor accident. Containment melt-through times, time evolution of fuel crusts, and time evolution of containment melt fronts are computed for a representative variety of pool conditions by means of a conduction-dominated model appropriate to a stagnant pool. This same model is used for preliminary estimates of conditions required to create molten pools of reactor materials under controlled conditions, in-pile, to study their subsequent boilup.