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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.
William J. Kovacs, Karl Bongartz, Dan T. Goodin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | March 1985 | Pages 344-354
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A Triso-coated particle stress model was used to describe pressure vessel failure in high-temperature gas-cooled reactor fuel particles. Two separate failure modes were treated, namely, category I, which applies to standard particles characterized by a load-bearing silicon carbide (SiC) layer and instantaneous pyrolytic carbon (PyC) and SiC failure, and category II, which applies to particles with a defective SiC layer incapable of supporting a tensile load. Closed-form solutions, which describe PyC and SiC coating layer stresses as a function of irradiation conditions and particle geometry, were adapted to Monte Carlo calculational routines. The PyC and SiC stresses were calculated for a large number (104 to 106) of particles, and particle failure was predicted to occur when the calculated coating layer tensile stresses exceeded either the SiC (category I failure) or PyC (category II failure) fracture lengths. Model predictions are generally consistent with irradiation test results and serve as a useful guide for particle design optimization studies and in-core fuel performance evaluations.