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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.
Kazuo Haga, Yoshihiro Kikuchi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August 1985 | Pages 220-234
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33646
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of experiments was performed to assess the thermal effect of a burst-type fission gas release from fuel pins. Simulated fission product gas was injected continuously and transiently from the central pin of a 37-pin bundle. The opposite pin surface impinged on by the released gas showed an extreme temperature rise under high coolant-flow conditions. Comparison of measured temperature change data with analytical results by a simple computer code revealed that the ratios of the heat transfer coefficient after gas injection to those of sodium single-phase flow were in the range of 0.05 to 0.15, irrespective of the magnitude of the gas plenum pressure and the nozzle diameter. The estimated pin-surface temperature increased by gas release in actual reactor operating conditions was less than the saturation temperature of sodium. The measured pressure pulse at the transient gas release was <0.2 times the initial gas plenum pressure.