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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.
Joe N. Smith, Jr., C. H. Meyer, Jr., J. K. Layton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 29 | Number 3 | June 1976 | Pages 318-321
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor Material / Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simultaneous auger electron spectroscopy and ion sputtering have been used to measure the sputter yield, S (atom/ion), for Ar+ on carbon, tungsten, niobium, and silver in the energy range from 0.5 to 1.5 keV and for H+ on tungsten, carbon, and silver at 11 keV. All measurements were performed on thin films, ranging in thickness from 150 to 6000 Å, which were maintained at room temperature during bombardment. These films were produced by vacuum vapor deposition, and the thicknesses were measured by surface profilometry. The auger electron signals were used to determine the time required to etch through a film; from these measurements and a knowledge of the ion current density, the sputter yield was determined. For Ar+, 0.7 ≲ S ≲ 5.1 and for H+, 0.004 ≲ S ≲ 0.04 for the various materials studied in this energy range. Agreement with earlier experimental results is generally within ±25%.