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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.
Junyong Bae, Jeeyea Ahn, Seung Jun Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 951-961
Technical Paper – Special section on the 2019 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1693215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human operators always have the possibility to commit human errors, and in safety-critical infrastructures such as a nuclear power plant, human error could cause serious consequences. Since nuclear plant operations involve highly complex and mentally taxing activities, especially in emergency situations, it is important to detect human errors to maintain plant safety. This work proposes a method to predict the future trends of important plant parameters to determine whether a performed action is an error or not. To achieve this prediction, a recursive strategy is adopted that employs an artificial neural network as its prediction model. Two artificial neural networks were selected and compared: multilayer perceptron and long short-term memory (LSTM). Model training was accomplished using emergency operation data from a nuclear power plant simulator. From the comparison results, it was observed that the future trends of plant parameters were quite accurately predicted through the LSTM model. It is expected that the plant parameter prediction function proposed in this work can give useful information for detecting and recovering human errors.