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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.
Bassam I. Shamoun, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 35-45
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental observation has shown that the assumption of complete fuel fragmentation in a vapor explosion by the shock adiabatic thermodynamic model results in predicting upper bounds for the shock pressure, propagation velocity, and work output. This model has been modified by considering the condition where the assumption of complete fragmentation of the fuel is relaxed. A methodology is adopted using experimental values of the shock pressure and propagation velocity to estimate the initial mixture conditions of the experiment and the mass fraction of the materials participating in the explosion. Analysis of a steady-state subcritical vapor explosion in one dimension has been carried out by applying the conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy and the appropriate equation of state for a homogeneous mixture of molten tin and water. The KROTOS-21 experiment, conducted at the Joint Research Center at Ispra, Italy, was used as the initial benchmark experiment in this analysis. A quasisteady explosion pressure of ∼3 MPa and a propagation velocity of ∼200 m/s were obtained in this experiment. Using this model, the estimated minimum mass of the fragmented fuel was found to be 0.21 kg (3.2%) of the total mass of the fuel. The predicted work output by this model corresponding to the aforementioned fragmented fuel mass was found to be 9.8 kJ. The estimated initial void fraction of the vapor was found to be 11.5%. In these analyses, a comparison is made of the various possible closure relations applied to the detonation wave theory for a vapor explosion and associated concerns of model stability in the two-phase region.