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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.
Constantine P. Tzanos
Nuclear Technology | Volume 77 | Number 3 | June 1987 | Pages 263-278
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A33966
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model was developed for faster than real-time liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core transient analysis for purposes of continuous on-line data validation, plant state verification, and fault identification. The basic feature of this model is the use of a nodal approximation for the coolant, cladding, and fuel temperatures that gives adequately accurate power and temperature predictions with very few axial nodes. In applications of this methodology to fast loss-of-flow and overpower transients, computation times of about one-thirtieth of the real transient time per thermal-hydraulic channel were obtained. The predicted coolant and cladding temperature distributions were practically identical to those resulting from detailed finite difference computations. The predicted fuel temperatures differed by ∼1% or less from those obtained from the same finite difference computations. The analysis of the Transient Reactor Test Facility experiment TS-1C and the Experimental Breeder Reactor II experiment SHRT-17 showed very good agreement between model predictions and measurements.