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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.
Kazuhiro Sawa, Isao Murata, Shusaku Shiozawa, Mikio Matsumoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 106 | Number 3 | June 1994 | Pages 265-273
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, a small amount of fission products (FPs) are released from fuel elements during normal operation, and condensable FPs plate out on the inner surface of primary cooling system components. In a depressurization accident, plated out FPs would be forced to reentrain or lift off by chemical and/or mechanical forces. The amount of liftoff FPs is important because they have a potential hazard of radiation exposure to the environment. In order to investigate the behavior of FPs under the rapid depressurization condition caused by a large-scale pipe rupture accident, blow down, wipe off, and leaching tests were carried out. It is observed that the liftoff of plated out FPs is caused not only by desorption but also by mechanical phenomena such as break of microstructure on the metal surface in the rapid depressurization condition. Then, it is considered that the liftoff fraction would depend on the fraction of migration of FPs into the oxide film or base metal.