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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.
C. M. Sommer, W. M. Stacey, B. Petrovic, C. L. Stewart
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 3 | June 2013 | Pages 274-285
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel cycle analyses of the transmutation of (a) all of the transuranics (TRUs) in light water reactor (LWR) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and of (b) the minor actinides (MAs) remaining in SNF (after separation of much of the plutonium for starting up fast reactors) have been performed for the conceptual subcritical advanced burner reactor (SABR) fission-fusion hybrid sodium-cooled fast burner reactor. Both metallic and oxide burner reactor fuels were considered, and the effect of clad radiation damage limit on fuel residence time was investigated. For a radiation damage limit of 200 displacements per atom, the support ratio (LWR power/SABR power) for transmuting all of the TRUs produced by LWRs is 3/1, and for transmuting just the MAs produced by LWRs the support ratio is 25/1. The reduction in high-level waste repository capacity required due to this transmutation is a factor of 10, based on a decay heat at a 100 000-yr limit on capacity.