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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.
Akio Yamamoto, Tsutomu Ikeno
Nuclear Technology | Volume 149 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 175-188
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3588
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, the effect of a pin-by-pin thermal-hydraulic feedback treatment on the core characteristics at a steady-state condition is investigated using a three-dimensional fine-mesh core calculation code. Currently, advanced nodal codes treat the inside of an assembly as homogeneous, and the temperature distribution inside a node is usually ignored. Namely, the fuel temperature is estimated from the assembly average power density, and the moderator temperature is calculated from the nodewise closed-channel model. However, the validity of a flat temperature distribution inside a node has not yet been investigated, because a three-dimensional pin-by-pin whole-core calculation must be done for comparison. A three-dimensional pin-by-pin nodal-transport code for a pressurized water reactor (PWR) core analysis, SCOPE2, was used in this study since it can directly treat the pin-by-pin feedback effect. A whole-core subchannel analysis code was developed to enhance the thermal-hydraulic capability of SCOPE2. The pin-by-pin feedback models for fuel and moderator temperature were established, and their impact on the core characteristics was investigated in a 3 × 3 multiassembly and the whole PWR core geometries. The calculations showed that modeling of the pin-by-pin temperature distribution revealed a negligible effect on core reactivity and only a slight impact on the radial peaking factor. The difference in the radial peaking factor that is exposed by the pin-by-pin temperature modeling is less than 0.005 in the test calculations.