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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.
Fumiaki Yamada, Yoshitaka Fukano, Hiroshi Nishi, Mamoru Konomura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 188 | Number 3 | December 2014 | Pages 292-321
Technical Note | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-56
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The capability of natural circulation for core cooling has been evaluated in detail for a station blackout (SBO) event induced by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami hit. The evaluation was prompted by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station of Tokyo Electric Power Company. The plant dynamics computer code Super-COPD was used for the evaluation, which has been validated by analyses of preliminary test results on the natural circulation in Monju. As a result, it was concluded that natural circulation of the sodium coolant will enable the decay heat from the core to be removed under such an SBO condition.