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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.
F. Eric Haskin, Min Huang, M. Kent Sasser, Desmond W. Stack
Nuclear Technology | Volume 106 | Number 2 | May 1994 | Pages 155-167
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34972
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The method of moments is applied to precisely determine the mean values of three importance measures: risk reduction, partial derivative, and variance reduction. Variance reduction calculations, in particular, are significantly improved by eliminating the imprecision associated with Monte Carlo estimates. The three importance measures are extended to permit analyses of the relative importance of groups of basic and initiating events. The partial derivative importance measure is extended by assessing the contribution of a group of events to the gradient of the top event frequency. The group importance measures are quantified for the overall fuel damage equation and for 14 dominant accident sequences from an independent probabilistic safety assessment of the K Production Reactor. This application demonstrates both the utility and the versatility of the group importance measures.