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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.
Herbert Reutler, Günter H. Lohnert
Nuclear Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July 1983 | Pages 22-30
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nearly all problems encountered in large High-temperature reactor power plants with respect to design and safety are related to the mere physical size of a larger reactor core. Our analyses show that it is feasible to subdivide a larger reactor core into modular units, analogous to the common practice of using several smaller units instead of one large unit. In connecting several modular reactor units in series,a larger power output can be obtained by merely using simple technical designs,in addition to utilizing the favorable safety characteristics of small pebble-bed cores.It can be shown that for these cores such classical safety devices as shutdown systems and decay heat removal systems lose their dominance in respect to risk evaluations.