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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.
Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Masayuki Uzawa, Shinichi Usui, Katsuhiro Tozawa, Shoji Kotake
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 293-302
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13476
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The JSFR is a commercial sodium-cooled fast reactor that has been studied in the Fast Reactor Cycle Technology Development (FaCT) project since 2006. For JSFR fuel handling, various fuel-handling systems (FHSs) were investigated, and an advanced FHS with an ex-vessel storage tank (EVST) was selected. This paper summarizes the various FHS concepts and comparisons among those concepts. In the reference system, spent-fuel subassemblies are cooled in the EVST before transfer to the spent-fuel storage pool. The other FHS concepts investigated are evolutional FHSs without an EVST. The result has indicated that the construction cost of the evolutional systems does not reduce the construction cost dramatically, which is mainly due to additional safety measures that required higher decay heat handling in a gas atmosphere and separated fresh and failed fuel storage. From an economics point of view, a longer plant outage of the evolutional systems offsets its advantage of the lower construction cost. Based on the results of this comparative study, JSFR selected the FHS with an EVST.