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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.
Jiankai Yu, Hyunsuk Lee, Hanjoo Kim, Peng Zhang, Deokjung Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 5 | May 2020 | Pages 728-742
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1677107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coupled neutronics–thermal-hydraulic simulation of the Benchmark for Evaluation and Validation of Reactor Simulations (BEAVRS) Cycle 1 depletion has been performed by the Monte Carlo–based multiphysics coupling code system MCS/CTF. MCS/CTF is a cyclewise pi-card iteration-based inner-coupling code system that couples the subchannel thermal-hydraulic code CTF as a thermal-hydraulic solver in the Monte Carlo neutron transport code MCS. MCS has been developed by the Computational Reactor Physics and Experiment Lab group at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology for the full-core analysis of large-scale commercial light water reactors with high fidelity at the engineering level. With the high-fidelity performance of MCS, the quarter-core pinwise depletion simulation for the BEAVRS Cycle 1 benchmark has been conducted with thermal-hydraulic feedback including fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and coolant density. Moreover, the MCS internal one-dimensional thermal-hydraulic solver TH1D (MCS/TH1D) has been utilized as the reference. On one hand, the simulated results of the criticality boron concentration and axially integrated assemblywise detector signals were compared with measured data. On the other hand, the comparisons of power, fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and density are also presented in this paper.