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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.
Yasuteru Sibamoto, Yutaka Kukita, Hideo Nakamura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 3 | September 2002 | Pages 205-220
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3314
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dynamic plunging behavior of a subcooled water jet into a pool of molten lead-bismuth alloy, visualized and measured using high-frame-rate neutron radiography, is described. It is shown that the interactions between water and heavy melt in this geometry differ in several aspects from those in melt injection into water investigated extensively in relation to fuel-coolant interactions. The maximum depth of jet penetration is limited by the buoyancy on and the onset of bulk boiling in the water which has collected in a "cavity." The bulk boiling starts as the subcooled water supply to the cavity becomes limited due to pinching instabilities in the upper region of the cavity. This leads to a transition to the final steady state.