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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.
Ahmed Badruzzaman, Martin Becker
Nuclear Technology | Volume 52 | Number 2 | February 1981 | Pages 198-213
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT81-A32665
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simplified methods based on the weak dependence of the fast reactor spectra on exposure have been developed for fuel cycle and sensitivity analysis of both the homogenized core and the core-blanket systems, resulting in significant savings in computer time relative to a direct method of spectrum calculation. Correlations of spectrum-averaged cross sections dependent on composition alone for the central core, and on composition and position for the core-blanket interface and the blanket region, were utilized in the depletion calculations. These provide sensitivities of the fuel cycle cost and the breeding performance to data uncertainties, and to design variations, in excellent agreement with those from the direct method. The simplified methods were then extended to perform exposure-dependent multigroup sensitivity analyses.