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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.
Finis H. Southworth, Hugh D. Campbell
Nuclear Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | September 1976 | Pages 434-436
Technical Note | Uranium Resource / Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermonuclear plasmas with a sufficient density-radius product, ρR, will degrade the energy spectrum of neutrons released in the plasma. This property may alleviate neutron damage, transmutation, and transient power loading in the first wall of laser-controlled thermonuclear reactors. In addition, degraded neutron energy spectra might be used as a diagnostic of compression in latter-stage laser fusion experiments. As an example of the degradation in the neutron spectrum, the energy spectrum of neutrons resulting from a thermonuclear deuterium-tritium plasma with ρR = 2 g/cm2 when using a simple model shows that ∼2.5 MeV of the neutron’s original 14.1 MeV is deposited in the pellet. As a figure of merit for the reduction of threshold reactions in the walls, the same model shows that ∼27%> of the neutrons are below 10 MeV in energy.