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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.
Wei Xu, Jianhua Xia, Xiaojing Liu, Xu Cheng, Wei Zeng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 281-296
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1457887
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Bottom reflooding is the third phase when a large-break loss-of-coolant accident occurs. Due to the complexity and importance, especially in a distinct narrow rectangular channel, various research methods can be utilized to understand the whole process. Test facility is established to figure out the thermal-hydraulic behaviors during bottom reflooding, and the acquisition of accurate solid temperature is essential. The inverse heat transfer problem method is applied to take full advantage of experimental data. In addition, a bottom reflooding transient (BRT) code is utilized to calculate various parameters conveniently. A three-dimensional heat conduction equation for a transient state is solved implicitly to obtain solid temperature distribution, surface heat flux, and heat transfer coefficient at the cooling surface. The simulation results of the BRT code are compared with that of RELAP5, an available system code, and the experimental results. A conclusion that can be derived is that the BRT code shows good applicability of simulating bottom reflooding in a narrow rectangular channel.