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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.
B. Hollrah, M. Bucknor, D. Lisowski, Y. Hassan, R. Vaghetto, R. Hu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 9 | September 2020 | Pages 1337-1350
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1745039
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Natural convection systems are a promising method to passively remove heat from reactor cavities during loss of forced flow accident scenarios. At Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), a highly instrumented Natural Convection Shutdown Heat Removal Test Facility (NSTF) was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of air-cooled natural convection systems. In previous work, RELAP5-3D simulations were performed on this facility with favorable comparisons to experiment for mass flow rate, pressure drop, air temperature increase, and air velocity. Both experimental and simulation efforts with this facility present a useful opportunity to perform a benchmark study with the System Analysis Module (SAM). SAM is an advanced thermal-hydraulic system code currently in development at ANL for advanced non–light water reactor safety analysis.