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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.
Sunanta Patrashakorn, Reiner Papp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 51 | Number 1 | November 1980 | Pages 7-12
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32550
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coprocessing is conceived as a method in which the plutonium is never available in a separate stream. In addition, it is possible to keep the transuranium actinides with the plutonium and uranium streams rather than allowing them to leave with the fission products and terminate in the high level waste. The recovered actinide product can be reconstructed as a fuel and recycled in light water reactors. But even after nine cycles the fuel composition does not reach equilibrium. Since the plutonium is never separated from other actinides, the potential of proliferation can be reduced.