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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.
Jean-Francois Wald, Bertrand Iooss
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 12 | December 2025 | Pages 2987-3003
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2025.2529125
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study proposes to quantify the uncertainty in a CPU time costly computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model used to evaluate the local temperature field in the situation of blocked fuel assembly in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) transfer tube. Several uncertain parameters are identified and a first uncertainty propagation study is conducted on a low-fidelity (poorly refined) mesh for CPU cost issues. Then, using the concept of “support points,” an algorithm is employed to reduce the size of the initial design of experiments. A high-fidelity model (finer mesh, more CPU time expensive) is then run on this small-size design of experiments. A metamodel was finally built on those high-fidelity results to propagate uncertainties and finely analyze the results. The successful results that are obtained show that metamodeling has the potential to overcome the issue of costly CPU time CFD models in the near future. Despite good quantitative results, the main purpose of the present study remains the novel methodology that was set up for uncertainty propagation in CFD.