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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.
S. David Sevougian, Vivek Jain, Robert J. MacKinnon, Patrick D. Mattie, Kevin G. Mon, Bryan E. Bullard
Nuclear Technology | Volume 163 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 92-100
Technical Paper | High-Level Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3973
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A total system performance assessment (TSPA) model has been developed to analyze the ability of the natural and engineered barriers of the Yucca Mountain repository to isolate nuclear waste over the period following repository closure. The principal features of the engineered barrier system are emplacement tunnels (or "drifts") containing a two-layer waste package (WP) for waste containment and a titanium drip shield to protect the WP from seeping water and falling rock. The 25-mm-thick outer shell of the WP is composed of Alloy 22, a highly corrosion-resistant nickel-based alloy. There are five nominal degradation modes of the Alloy 22: general corrosion, microbially influenced corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, early failure due to manufacturing defects, and localized corrosion (LC). This paper specifically examines the incorporation of the Alloy 22 LC model into the Yucca Mountain TSPA model, particularly the abstraction and modeling methodology, as well as issues dealing with scaling, spatial variability, uncertainty, and coupling to other submodels that are part of the total system model, such as the submodel for seepage water chemistry.