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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.
A. B. Reynolds, J. L. Kelly, S. T. Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 74 | Number 1 | July 1986 | Pages 76-83
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT86-A33820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fractional release rates of relatively low volatility fission products from fuel have been measured at the Sascha facility at Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany, and elsewhere as a function of fuel temperature. A mass transfer model was developed to calculate these release rates. Of six materials (fission products or fission product oxides) analyzed at temperatures from 1800 to 2400°C, favorable comparisons between experiments and theory were obtained for silver, antimony, ruthenium, BaO, and ZrO2, while insufficient experimental data were available for SrO. The favorable comparison for the five materials provides a strong argument that vaporization mass transfer is controlling the release rate for certain low-volatility fission products.