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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.
D. S. Kopecki, K. M. Ralls, E. Linn Draper, Jr.
Nuclear Technology | Volume 29 | Number 1 | April 1976 | Pages 98-107
Technical Paper | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A16294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Composition changes that occur during neutron bombardment have been calculated for the first wall of a hypothetical fusion reactor. The first wall materials studied are pure niobium, zirconium, molybdenum, and vanadium, and some of their binary alloys. Two integrated neutron flux intensities, 3.8 × 1014 n/(cm2 sec) and 3.8 × 1015 n/(cm2 sec) up to a fluence of 3.6 × 1023 n/cm2, have been used in the calculations of the first three materials. In addition, the composition as a function of fluence (maximum fluence =4.0 × 1023 n/cm2) has been calculated for a vanadium wall. Graphs for each material have been plotted to show the variation of composition as a function of time and/or fluence. Rates of production of hydrogen and helium have been calculated for all four materials; comparisons for niobium and vanadium walls with literature values show agreement that it is not poor. Furthermore, mixture diagrams have been constructed for two binary alloy systems, niobium-zirconium and niobium-vanadium, to relate composition at constant irradiation time to the initial composition.