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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.
Grant L. Hawkes, James E. O'Brien, Carl M. Stoots, J. Stephen Herring, Mehrdad Shahnam
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 2 | May 2007 | Pages 132-144
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3831
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been created to model high-temperature steam electrolysis in a planar solid-oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC). The model represents a single cell as it would exist in an electrolysis stack. Details of the model geometry are specific to a stack tested at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Mass, momentum, energy, and species conservation and transport are provided via the core features of the commercial CFD code FLUENT. A solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) model adds the electrochemical reactions and loss mechanisms and computation of the electric field throughout the cell. The FLUENT SOFC user-defined subroutine was modified to allow for operation in the SOEC mode. Model results provide detailed profiles of temperature, Nernst potential, operating potential, anode-side gas composition, cathode-side gas composition, current density, and hydrogen production in a range of stack operating conditions. Mean model results are shown to compare favorably with experimental results obtained from an actual ten-cell stack tested at INL.