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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.
Michio Murase, Yoichi Utanohara, Takayoshi Kusunoki, Yasunori Yamamoto, Dirk Lucas, Akio Tomiyama
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2017 | Pages 140-157
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-96
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We proposed prediction methods for countercurrent flow limitation (CCFL) in horizontal and slightly inclined pipes with one-dimensional (1-D) computations and uncertainty of computed CCFL. In this study, we applied the proposed methods to a full-scale pressurizer surge line [inclination angle θ = 0.6 deg, diameter D = 300 mm, and ratio of the length to the diameter (L/D) = 63] in a specific pressurized water reactor, performed 1-D computations and three-dimensional (3-D) numerical simulations, and found that uncertainties caused by effects of the diameter and fluid properties on CCFL were small. We also applied the proposed methods to experiments for hot-leg and surge line models (θ = 0 and 0.6 deg, D = 0.03 to 0.65 m, and L/D = 4.5 to 63) to generalize them, performed 1-D computations, and found that uncertainties caused by effects of θ and L on CCFL were large due to the setting error for θ and differences among experiments. This shows that a small-scale air-water experiment with the same θ and L/D as those in an actual plant is effective to reduce the uncertainty of CCFL prediction.