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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.
Stanley K. Widener
Nuclear Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | January 1986 | Pages 34-38
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT86-A33749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a loss-of-coolant accident, the pressure suppression pool of a boiling water reactor swells as a steam/ air mixture is expelled from the drywell into the pool and large gas bubbles are formed beneath the surface. Many tests have been performed to quantify pool swell loads, but analytical methods have been limited in their ability to provide accurate loading estimates. With advancement of numerical methods, it is now feasible to numerically simulate the pool swell process. A finite difference solution algorithm is used to solve the transient incompressible equations for the liquid flow field. Boundary conditions at the fluid/gas interface are determined using a simplified gas flow model. The program is used to simulate several pool swell tests; comparison of the simulation with test data shows good agreement.