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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.
Kunihiko Takeda, Yoshikazu Nishigaki, Hatsuki Onitsuka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 89 | Number 3 | March 1990 | Pages 381-387
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes and Isotope Separation | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34376
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Asahi chemical enrichment pilot plant with four large-scale 1-mm-diam enrichment columns has been operated using the “super” process since June 1987. Uranium with 3.3% enrichment was recovered in April 1988, and higher efficiencies have been observed in the pilot plant than in the bench-scale plant, which has 0.1-mm-diam enrichment columns. A possible reason is that the isotopic backmixing in the pilot plant is much smaller than in the bench-scale plant. Quantitative and statistical studies imply that both the extracolumn volume ratio and wall effect contribute to the smaller backmixing.