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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.
John C. Lee, Sin Tao Hsue
Nuclear Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 1987 | Pages 203-208
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A33874
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on a simplified solution of the balance equations for concentration of uranium and plutonium isotopes and a set of two-group microscopic cross sections, isotopic ratios, 235U/U, Pu/U, and 239Pu/235U, are calculated as a function of fuel burnup for pressurized water reactor spent fuel. The two-group cross sections for 235U, 238U, 239Pu, and water are collapsed into equivalent thermal-group constants, with the fast-to-thermal flux ratio obtained through a two-group criticality consideration. For this purpose, parasitic neutron captures are represented through a simple semiempirical relationship. The calculational model, incorporated as the BURN code, yields isotopic ratios that compare favorably with three major data sets from the ISTLIB data bank.