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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.
Han Gyu Joo, Jae-Jun Jeong, Byung-Oh Cho, Won Jae Lee, Sung Quun Zee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 2 | May 2003 | Pages 166-179
Technical Paper | OECD/NRC MSLB Benchmark | doi.org/10.13182/NT142-166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The refined core thermal-hydraulics (T-H) nodalization feature of the MARS/MASTER code is used to generate a high-fidelity solution to the OECD main steam line break benchmark problem and to investigate the effects of core T-H nodalization. The MARS/MASTER coupling scheme is introduced first that enables efficient refined node core T-H calculations via the COBRA-III module. The base solution is generated using a fine T-H nodalization consisting of fuel assembly-sized radial nodes. Sensitivity studies are performed on core T-H nodalization to examine the impacts on core reactivity, power distribution, and transient behavior. The results indicate that the error in the peak local power can be very large (up to 25%) with a coarse T-H nodalization because of the inability to incorporate detailed thermal feedback. A demonstrative departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) calculation shows no occurrence of DNB in this problem.