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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.
Walter Seifritz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | November 1983 | Pages 286-294
Technical Paper | Economic | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nuclear reactor strategy that involves light water reactors (LWRs) and advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs) with a high conversion ratio was analyzed in a logistical manner assuming a finite resource of ∼5 million metric tons of natural uranium. The emphasis lies in the treatment of the dynamics of deploying this two-component LWR-APWR system. The result is that the improvement of the uranium utilization is a function of time and reaches its maximum value (a factor of ∼3 compared with the classical plutonium recycling) only at the very end of the cheap natural uranium era. In view of the future role of nuclear energy in covering a substantial part of the global energy demand, it is shown that an LWR-APWR reactor strategy could neither reach an acceptable power level nor would it be able to support such a level over a significant period of time. If we want to raise the nuclear capacity to a reasonable level, the early introduction of the fast breeder reactor is unavoidable.