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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.
C. A. Nixon, W. R. Marcum, K. M. Steer, R. B. Jackson, M. G. Martin, A. W. Weiss
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 218-230
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1649583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Presently there exist no experimental methods readily available to characterize the comprehensive motion of wire-wrapped pins for the purpose of measuring fluid structure interactions. Specifically, the dearth of capabilities lies in the need to capture pin-to-pin interactions within the bundle that do not have visual access. This study leverages recent previous efforts that have demonstrated the successful use of a distributed strain sensor to characterize the motion of a single wire-wrapped pin under fluid flow and expands through the use of multiple instrumented pins to characterize the simultaneous motion of pin-to-pin interaction. The outcome of this study demonstrates the direct measurement of pin-to-pin contact, rubbing, and interaction over a range of relevant flow rates on a 19-pin wire-wrapped bundle.