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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.
Andrew Richard Raymond Telford
Nuclear Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | January 1982 | Pages 33-39
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A32878
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tests have been carried out on one of the advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) at Hinkley Point to determine the fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, an important safety-related parameter. Reactor neutron flux was measured during transients induced by movement of a bank of control rods from one steady position to another. An inverse kinetics analysis was applied to the recorded flux transient to determine the reactivity change as the fuel temperature changed, and the variation of mean fuel temperature was derived from the flux transient by a multiplane thermal-hydraulics code representing an AGR fuel channel The fuel temperature coefficient was then obtained from the slope of a plot of core reactivity against fuel temperature. The uncertainty to be applied to the derived temperature coefficient has been shown to be approximately ±10% at the one standard deviation level The experimental technique has been found to be simple to apply on a commercial reactor and has given consistent results over a range of reactor operating conditions. Calculations of fuel temperature coefficients of reactivity (based on the lattice code, ARGOSY) have been carried out and reactor averaged values deduced for comparison with experiment. The calculated and measured coefficients agree to within one standard deviation over a range of core irradiations and power levels.