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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.
Jintae Hong, Kwang-Jae Son, Jong-Bum Kim, Jin-Joo Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 8 | August 2020 | Pages 1213-1223
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1682899
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute is planning to launch a satellite for the Korea launch vehicle’s low orbit test in 2021. An electrically heated thermoelectric generator (ETG) with a mass of 850 g (small ETG) will be one of its selected payloads for this test flight. To assess and assure the design heritage and the reliability of the ETG in the space environment, a small ETG will be tested at the top of the satellite for more than a year. In this study, the design for a small ETG with 10 W(thermal) of heat input was developed through simulations such as heat transfer analysis, modal analysis, thermoelectric analysis, and structural analysis. Then a mock-up was fabricated and basic performance tests were carried out to be ready for the space environment test.