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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.
Yuji Ishiguro
Nuclear Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | April 1983 | Pages 121-126
Technical Note | Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33150
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new concept of fueling a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) is proposed with the aims of increasing the resource base of nuclear energy for the generation of electricity and of resolving the safety question of current LMFBRs. The basic feature of the concept is the use of 233U/Th fuel in a central part of the LMFBR core and Pu/U fuel in the outer core. The reactor is flexible in its utilization of nuclear fuels and can be an efficient breeder reactor with either the uranium or the thorium cycle. The safety characteristics of the reactor are superior to those of plutonium-fueled LMFBRs of current designs with the sodium-void reactivities being negative almost everywhere in the core. The design and thermal characteristics of the proposed pins indicate that in the 233U/Th-fueled inner core, thick soft-spectrum pins can be advantageous over solid pins of a more conventional type.