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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.
Tsutomu Hoshino, Tomonori Shirakawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 56 | Number 3 | March 1982 | Pages 465-477
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A32905
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The three-dimensional boiling water reactor (BWR) core following the daily load was simulated by the use of the processor array for continuum simulation (PACS-32), a newly developed parallel microprocessor system. The PACS system consists of 32 processing units (PUs) (microprocessors) and has a multiinstruction, multidata type architecture, being optimum to the numerical simulation of the partial differential equations. The BWR core model includes the modified two-group finite difference, coarse-mesh model for neu-tronics, steady-state model for thermohydraulics, criticality control by core coolant flow, and the time-dependent solution of iodine-xenon dynamics with constant flux level. The analysis of the parallel processing program revealed that the overhead is independent from the number of PUs and that the efficiency of PUs, i.e., the ratio of effective calculation over total, amounts to 75%, even up to 90% if it is limited to the core part. Simulation was made on the daily load follow for 144 h including the weekend, which took 1.3 central processing unit hours by the PACS system. The PACS system demonstrated a computation speed nearly one-tenth that of the large-scale high-speed general purpose computer, with a 25 times better cost-performance ratio and showed that the system could be used as the practical BWR core simulator with more complicated core models.