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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.
F. S. Felber
Nuclear Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | September 1980 | Pages 119-123
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32537
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three methods of fueling a small moving ring field-reversed mirror are considered: injection of fuel pellets accelerated by laser ablation, injection of fuel pellets accelerated by deflagration-gun ablation, and direct injection of plasma by a deflagration gun. A CO2 laser with pulse energy of several hundred joules and power consumption of tens of kilowatts can probably generate the necessary pellet velocities of ∼107 cm/s. The plasma beam of a deflagration gun might accelerate fuel pellets efficiently if beam focusing can be improved by about an order of magnitude. Deflagration guns are probably not presently capable of fueling a small reactor directly, but may become more attractive than laser-driven pellets if both average beam ion density and focusing can be improved, or if plasma density is lower than expected.