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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.
Robert Spears, Swetha Veeraraghavan, Justin Coleman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1205-1218
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1584492
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seismic analyses of nuclear facilities require the use of validated numerical models that can realistically reproduce the response of soils during earthquakes. The nested surface nonlinear, hysteretic soil constitutive model is one of the soil constitutive models that is widely used because of (1) its lower number of free parameters compared to other nonlinear soil constitutive models and (2) the ease of calibrating these parameters using the commonly available soil data, i.e., G/Gmax and damping curves, as a function of shear strain. This material model is available in the commercial finite element software packages LS-DYNA and Abaqus as well as in the open source finite element tool Mastodon. The purpose of this study is to estimate the parameters required for this material model from the soil data available for the Lotung site and to demonstrate that this nonlinear soil constitutive model used in a time domain, finite element analysis can reasonably reproduce the actual measured soil motions recorded at Lotung during the LSST07 event on May 20, 1986. Results are presented from all the three software packages mentioned above using the same material model.