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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.
Sadao Uchikawa, Tsutomu Okubo, Yoshihiro Nakano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 172 | Number 2 | November 2010 | Pages 132-142
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10900
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The FLWR is a boiling water reactor type with a core consisting of hexagonal-shaped fuel assemblies with a triangular-lattice fuel rod configuration, which has been proposed in order to ensure a sustainable energy supply in the future based on well-established light water reactor technologies. This paper proposes a new concept of fuel assembly design named FLWR/MIX. The first stage of FLWR is designed to conserve plutonium effectively with a fissile plutonium conversion ratio of around 1.0, keeping negative void reactivity characteristics. Enriched UO2 fuel rods are arranged in the peripheral region of the assembly, surrounding the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods in the central region. Performance evaluation shows that the FLWR/MIX concept is effective for controlling the void reactivity characteristics in the tight-lattice fuel rod configuration and is promising under the framework of the UO2 and MOX fuel technologies and related infrastructures that have been established for the current LWR-MOX utilization.