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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.
M. J. Plaster, B. Basoglu, C. L. Bentley, M. E. Dunn, A. E. Ruggles, A. D. Wilkinson, T. Yamamoto, H. L. Dodds
Nuclear Technology | Volume 111 | Number 2 | August 1995 | Pages 219-226
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety Special / Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35131
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A hypothetical nuclear criticality accident in a waste supercompactor is examined. The material being compressed in the compactor is a homogeneous mixture of beryllium and 239Pu. The point-kinetics equations with simple thermal-hydraulic feedback are used to model the transient behavior of the system. A lumped-parameter energy balance is used to determine the bulk temperature of the system. A computer code has been developed to solve the model equations. The computer code calculates the fission power history, fission yield, bulk temperature of the system, and several other thermal-hydraulic parameters of interest. Calculations have been performed for the waste supercompactor for various material misloading configurations. The peak power for the various accident scenarios varies from 1.04 × 1017 to 4.85 × 1020 fissions per second (fps). The total yield varies from 8.21 × 1017 to 7.73 × 1018 fissions, and the bulk temperature of the system varies from 412 to >912 K.