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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.
Bernhard Brand, Hans-Peter Gaul, Janardan Sarkar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | January 1982 | Pages 128-133
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A32888
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a test facility with two parallel boiling water reactor fuel assemblies, experiments were carried out with top spray and bottom flooding, simulating loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) conditions. The flow area restriction, caused by the ballooning of fuel rod cladding within one of the bundles, was provided by blockage plates, which had reductions of 37% in one case and in a second series 70%) of the flow area. Test parameters were system pressure (1, 5, and 10 bars), spray (0.68 and 1.02 m3/h) and flooding rates (1.5, 2, and 3.3 cm/s), power input (520 and 614 kW), and the initial cladding temperature (600 and 800°C at midplane) of the heaters. The test results showed no significant variations from those without blockage, except in the blocked region. An enhancement of heat transfer was observed in a close region downstream from the blockage in cases such as bottom flooding and top spray tests. The results will serve the purpose of code verification for reactor LOCA analysis.