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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.
Ethwart Pollmann, Joachim Schulze, Dieter Kreuter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 3 | December 1994 | Pages 350-360
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35017
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a boiling water reactor, nuclear-thermal-hydraulic instabilities can occur if extreme operating conditions prevail. In various nuclear reactors, stability measurements have been carried out during which the location and the shape of the stability threshold was measured at a certain exposure point during the cycle. Earlier sensitivity studies have already shown that fuel assembly parameters have only a small influence on stability compared with plant parameters. The influence of plant parameters has been verified by measurements that were carried out in the German boiling water reactor Würgassen every 4 to 6 weeks during cycle 14. The results of the measurements showed for the single-loop operation point (least stable point in the core map) a strong variation of the stability threshold power during the cycle. From the beginning of cycle to the middle of cycle, the stability threshold power decreases by ∼16% (relative). After the minimum was reached, the stability threshold power increased again. Smaller variations of the stability threshold power in the core map at natural circulation indicate that not only the stability threshold varies during the cycle, but also the shape of the stability threshold is changed. Analyses with the code system STAIF have shown that the stability behavior during the cycle can clearly be correlated with the variation of the axial and radial power density profile due to control rod maneuvering and fuel burnup. Furthermore, it could be shown that for the estimation of the neutronic feedback not only the density coefficient must be taken into account but also the void variation caused by a power perturbation.