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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.
Byung-Ho Lee, Yang-Hyun Koo, Han-Soo Kim, Jae-Yong Oh, Young-Woo Lee, Dong-Seong Sohn, Wolfgang Wiesenack
Nuclear Technology | Volume 172 | Number 3 | December 2010 | Pages 246-254
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Attrition-milling technology for fabricating mixed oxide (MOX) fuel was developed to mix the plutonium in UO2 fuels as homogeneously as possible. The fabricated MOX fuels were instrumented with temperature and pressure gauges that enabled one to measure the fuel temperature and rod internal pressure online. An irradiation test in the Halden reactor was performed to investigate the in-pile behavior of the fabricated MOX fuel. The irradiation of 1020 effective full-power days was successfully accomplished with good integrity of the test fuel rods. The rod average burnup reached [approximately]50 MWd/kg HM, and the measured fuel centerline temperature was [approximately]1000°C for the MOX fuels. A significant fission gas release was observed due to the high power level. The online measured in-pile performance data of the two attrition-milled MOX fuel rods were analyzed and compared with the fuel performance code COSMOS. COSMOS simulated the fuel centerline temperature and rod internal pressure for both MOX fuel rods. The analysis by COSMOS showed good agreement with the online measured in-pile behavior of MOX fuel.