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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.
Mohamed S. El-Genk, Cheng Gao
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 3 | June 1996 | Pages 351-364
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35239
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quenching experiments were performed to investigate the effects of radius of curvature and edge angle on pool boiling from downward-facing surfaces in saturated water. The experiments employed two, 20-mm-thick copper test sections that had the same diameter (75 mm) but different surface radii (148 and 218.5 mm) and vapor release (or edge) angles (14.68 and 9.88 deg). The effect of surface area on pool boiling was determined by comparing the present results with the results for a copper section that was of the same thickness but had a surface radius of 148 mm and was less than one-half the surface area. The maximum heat flux (qMHF) was highest at the lowermost position and decreased with increased local inclination on the surface. Both local and surface average qMHF were representative of quasi-steady-state critical heat flux. The high edge angle reduced vapor accumulation, which enhanced surface coolability and shortened its quenching time. For an edge angle of 9.88 deg, increasing the surface area (or surface radius) insignificantly affected the local qMHF near the edge of the copper section but lowered it everywhere else by ∼10%. For the same surface area, the larger edge angle (or smaller surface radius) increased qMHF by as much as 40%.