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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.
S. Mostafa Ghiaasiaan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 81 | Number 1 | April 1988 | Pages 28-38
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model was developed to simulate thermal-hy-draulic phenomena in the downcomer and lower plenum of a pressurized water reactor during reflooding. The system dynamics were formulated in terms of a set of time-dependent ordinary differential equations that were integrated numerically. A model was developed to simulate the oscillatory flow in the downcomer-lower plenum-core system. A numerical procedure was devised for solving the governing global momentum equation. This procedure is shown to be numerically stable and computationally efficient. The developed model for downcomer and lower plenum was coupled to the core thermal-hydraulic model, and predictions were made for FLECHT-SET experimental data. The results compared well with the experiment.