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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.
Jeffrey N. Brooks, Robert L. Kustom
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | November 1979 | Pages 61-81
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32380
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The power supply requirements for a 7-m major radius commercial tokamak reactor have been examined, using a system approach combining models of the reactor and poloidal coil set, plasma burn cycle and magnetohydrodynamics calculations, and power supply characteristics and cost data. A conventional system using a motor-generator flywheel set and solid-state rectifier/inverter power supplies was studied in addition to systems using a homo-polar generator, superconducting energy storage inductor, and dump resistors. The requirements and cost of the power supplies depend on several factors but most critically on the ohmic heating ramp time used for startup. Long ramp times (≳8 s) seem to be feasible, from the standpoint of resistive volt-second losses, and would appear to make conventional systems quite competitive with nonconventional ones, which require further research and development.