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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.
Francesc Reventós, José Sánchez-Baptista, Alberto Pérez Navas, Pablo Moreno
Nuclear Technology | Volume 90 | Number 3 | June 1990 | Pages 294-307
Technical Paper | RELAP/MOD2 / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34395
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic analysis group at Asociación Nuclear Ascó has prepared a model of the plant using RELAP5/MOD2. Protection and control sys-tems have been added as well as a kinetic model in order to accurately analyze plant transients. A new system to record process information collected by plant instrumentation is being installed and will provide a more accurate follow-up of operational and incidental transients of the plant. The current recording system provides adequate information in terms of safety and operation, but there are some interpretation problems when it is used to validate a thermal-hydraulic model. Under these conditions, the selection of transients to assess has been the most important step on qualifying the model. Once a steady-state calculation is achieved, six actual transients are selected to validate the model. From this analysis, it is concluded that the level of qualification of the model is sufficient to validate the predictions of the behavior of the plant under such situations. This process will continue for other transients to broaden the capabilities of the model.