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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.
Hiromi Maruyama, Junichi Koyama, Motoo Aoyama, Kazuya Ishii, Atsushi Zukeran, Takashi Kiguchi, Akira Nishimura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 118 | Number 1 | April 1997 | Pages 3-13
Technical Paper | Kiyose Birthday Anniversary Special / Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35351
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A core analysis system has been developed for the recent advanced designs of boiling water reactors. This system consists of a fuel assembly analysis code VMONT and a three-dimensional core simulator COSNEX. To cope with heterogeneous structures found in the recent high-performance fuel, VMONT employs a Monte Carlo neutron transport calculation method. COSNEX is based on a three-group nodal expansion method to treat spectral interactions among fuel assemblies. Both codes are vectorized to meet timing requirements as design tools. The analysis system is verified by the tracking of recent plant operations. Although the analyzed cores are highly heterogeneous in the multienrichment configuration, the system gives sufficient accuracy both in critical eigenvalues and thermal power distributions.