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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.
Yang Tang, Yangping Zhou, Zhiwei Zhou, Lei Shi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 1 | October 2017 | Pages 27-44
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1352329
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Different from most current commercial nuclear power plants, the High-Temperature gas-cooled Reactor Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) power plant consists of two reactor modules connected to a common steam turbine system that will bring a special coupling effect between the two reactor modules. An engineering simulator of the HTR-PM plant was developed by embedding the THERMIX/BLAST code into the vPower simulation platform. Two sets of nuclear steam supply systems of HTR-PM, including two reactors, two steam generators, two helium blowers, and the helium flow ducts, were simulated by two THERMIX/BLAST code modules, respectively. The entire secondary loop system was simulated using intrinsic models of the vPower simulation platform. The vPower platform connects and synchronizes the two THERMIX/BLAST modules, as well as the simulation module for the secondary loop system. The engineering simulator was applied to simulate the behavior of HTR-PM under steady-state operation, startup and shutdown processes, and accident conditions. The coupling effect during the condition conversion process and the thermal characteristics under accident conditions of HTR-PM were analyzed by the engineering simulator.