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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.
Jean-Marie Seiler, Angélique Fouquet, Karine Froment, Francoise Defoort
Nuclear Technology | Volume 141 | Number 3 | March 2003 | Pages 233-243
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3364
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model is proposed describing the corium pool behavior with a material composition presenting a miscibility gap. The model is described in the first part of this paper, and the state of its validation is developed in the second part, against SIMECO experiments. Qualitatively the model predicts the experimental behavior (domain of existence of two layers, phase separation in the boundary layers, and power split). Applicability to the reactor situation is discussed. It is also concluded that the time delay to obtain physicochemical equilibrium between liquid phases is of the same order of magnitude as the time delay necessary to obtain thermal-hydraulic steady state (established heat flux distribution).