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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.
Seungmin Oh, Haijing Gao, Shripad T. Revankar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 2 | May 2007 | Pages 208-218
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental study and best-estimate thermal-hydraulic code model assessment is performed to investigate the characteristics of the filmwise condensation with and without noncondensable gas in a passive condenser system. A vertical condenser tube is submerged in a water pool, where the heat from the condenser tube is removed through boiling heat transfer. Data are obtained for various inlet steam flow rates and noncondensable gas mass fractions at various system pressure conditions for two tube inner diameters: 26.6 and 52.5 mm. Experimental data are compared with analysis for complete condensation and flow-through conditions. Degradation of the condensation with noncondensable gas is investigated, where the condensation heat transfer coefficient decreases with the noncondensable gas. Experimental results are simulated with the RELAP5 code using two different condensation models. Code predictions are compared with experimental data, and the results indicate that there is a need for improved condensation models in RELAP5.