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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.
Sule Ergun, Jason G. Williams, Lawrence E. Hochreiter, Hergen Wiersema, Marcel Slootman, Marek Stempniewicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 163 | Number 2 | August 2008 | Pages 273-284
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3987
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, calculations were performed to simulate a postulated large-break loss-of-coolant accident for the High Flux Reactor (HFR) cooling system using the COBRA-TF computer code. COBRA-TF has been chosen for this analysis since it has suitable and validated two-phase flow models and critical heat flux (CHF) correlations for channels having small hydraulic diameters. Calculations have been performed to determine the CHF margins for the HFR. Six types of calculations were performed to provide a range of CHF margins. All COBRA-TF calculations indicate that margin does exist to the CHF limit for the small-hydraulic-diameter highest-power HFR channel. The range of margin is 2.1 to 1.3 times the nominal power of the highest power channel, depending on the boundary conditions and CHF correlation used. The range of margin identified in the HFR analysis is consistent with the margin values used in commercial nuclear power plants.