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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.
Stanislav P. Uryasev, Pranab K. Samanta
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 2 | November 1996 | Pages 245-256
Technical Paper | Reactor Operation | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure-dependent testing implies a test of redundant components (or trainsj when the failure of one component has been detected. The purpose of such testing is to detect any common-cause failures (CCFs) of multiple components so that a corrective action, such as repair or plant shutdown, can be taken to reduce the residence time of multiple failures. This type of testing focuses on reducing the conditional risk of CCFs. Formulas are developed for calculating the conditional failure probability of a two-train system with different test, repair, and shutdown strategies. A methodology is presented, with an example calculation, showing the risk effectiveness offailure-dependent strategies for emergency diesel generators in nuclear power plants. Four alternative actions after the identification of a failure of one component are analyzed: (a) not carrying out any additional testing, (b) testing the redundant components and shutting down the plant if a CCF is present, (c) emergency repair of the failed component in a given time (less than the allowed outage time), and (d) additional testing of redundant components after the repair of the failed component.