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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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Stefano Salvatores, Yuri Orechwa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure times of components are traditionally used to evaluate their reliability. An alternate approach is to analyze the degradation data accumulated during the component’s testing or during its normal operation. Degradation analysis is particularly useful when it is not possible to observe a significant number of failures. This is the case for metallic Integral Fast Reactor fuel pins irradiated in Experimental Breeder Reactor II, where failures have not taken place under normal operating conditions. A degradation analysis methodology is presented and applied to these pins. The time-to-failure distribution for the fuel pins is estimated based on a fixed threshold failure model. The confidence intervals of the distribution are calculated using a parametric bootstrap method.