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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.
Luca Galbiati, Luigi Mazzocchi, Paolo Vanini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 3 | March 1996 | Pages 338-345
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35213
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The simplified boiling water reactor makes use of an isolation condenser (1C) submerged in a large water pool; following a postulated accident, the pool water boils off, releasing steam to the atmosphere and ensuring passive containment cooling for at least 3 days. A further improvement is the isolation condenser pool cooling system (ICPCS), proposed by ENEL /CISE. It makes use of reflux condensing heat exchangers directly connected to the pool gas space of the IC; noncondens-able gases can be vented during the earlier phase of operation by means of a water seal mechanism operating in a passive way. The expected benefits from the ICPCS are the elimination of constraints on the “grace period” duration and the possibility of avoiding an extended release of a visible and potentially radioactive steam plume. To verify the performance both at component and system level, an instrumented ICPCS prototype, operating with a thermal power scaling factor of ∼1:615, has been built and tested at CISE laboratories, both in steady and dynamic conditions. The experimental results confirm the capability of the tested ICPCS module to operate in a safe and passive way.