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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.
H. S. Bailey, Y. S. Lu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | June 1979 | Pages 76-82
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32239
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A study of various core designs was conducted to investigate design features pertaining to the preclusion of energetic hypothetical core disruptive accidents. The design data and core layouts for different designs are described. A summary of the nuclear performance predicted for several typical low sodium void worth cores is presented. It appears that the tightly coupled heterogeneous core configuration offers a substantial reduction in prompt void worth and flux level at the expense of greater inventory, large flux gradients, and large changes in internal blanket power over the operating cycle.