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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.
Sadia Khalid, Idrees Ahmad, Awais Zahur
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1175-1184
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580530
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-term, safe, and reliable operation of a reactor coolant pump is vital for the safety of a nuclear reactor. In the case of a station blackout or power failure to the pump, the inertia of rotating parts of the pump should provide sufficient pumping capacity or flow rate to remove decay heat to ensure the safety of the reactor. An accurate flow coastdown analysis is required for the design and manufacture of reactor coolant pumps. In this paper a mathematical model is formulated to study flow coastdown of CHASNUPP-2, which is a pressurized water reactor. Frictional losses in the pump are also incorporated in the model to get accurate results. Two important parameters of the model are inertia of the pump impeller and inertia of the coolant, which are related to each other in the form of effective energy ratio. The effective energy ratio is made variable in order to accurately model the flow coastdown transient. The model is solved numerically to get flow coastdown curves and the comparison of the theoretical and experimental results shows a good agreement between them.