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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.
Yoshihisa Ikusawa, Koji Maeda, Masato Kato, Masayoshi Uno
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 83-95
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1314748
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on thermal computation results obtained using an irradiation behavior analysis code, we have evaluated the effect of oxide-metal ratio on fuel restructuring from the results of postirradiation examinations for the B14 irradiation test fuel, which was a mixed oxide fuel and was irradiated in the experimental reactor Joyo. The thermal computation results showed that fuel restructuring in the stoichiometric oxide fuel was accelerated, though the fuel temperature in the stoichiometric oxide fuel was evaluated as lower than that of the hypo-stoichiometric one. We explained this behavior as follows: first, the fuel temperature decreased due to the high thermal conductivity at stoichiometry; second, the pore migration velocity increased due to the increase in vapor pressure caused by the high vapor pressure of UO3, which was derived from the high oxygen potential at stoichiometry. In addition, our results indicated that the central void diameter strongly depended on not only fuel temperature, but also vapor pressure.