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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.
Steven A. Wright, Erhard A. Fischer, Peter K. Mast, Gustav Schumacher
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 326-340
Technical Paper | Analyse | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During an unprotected loss-of-flow accident in a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, the mode of fuel disruption in sodium-voided channels and the subsequent fuel and clad motion are important issues that determine the further accident sequence. To study these phenomena, a series of in-pile fuel disruption experiments, FD2/4, were performed, and the fuel behavior was recorded by high-speed cinematography. Power transients typical of a heterogeneous (e.g., Clinch River Breeder Reactor) and a homogeneous (e.g., SNR-300, Federal Republic of Germany) core design were employed. In the first case, large-scale liquid swelling was observed, whereas in the second case, disruption by solid-state breakup occurred. Both observations provided direct experimental confirmation of the assumption usually made in the accident analysis, and thus removed still existing modeling uncertainties concerning the disruption behavior.