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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.
Tadashi Inoue, Masahiro Sakata, Hajime Miyashiro, Tetsuo Matsumura, Akihiro Sasahara, Nobuya Yoshiki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 93 | Number 2 | February 1991 | Pages 206-220
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34506
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-level radioactive wastes from the Purex process contain long-lived nuclides, which mainly consist of transuranic elements (TRUs). A partitioning and transmutation method that consists of pyrometallurgical partitioning of TRUs from Purex waste from light water reactor fuel and transmutation using a metal-fueled fast breeder reactor (FBR) is evaluated. The results indicate that the concept is feasible and has many advantages over conventional concepts based on wet processes and that transmutation of TRUs in a metal-fueled FBR is advantageous over that in a oxide-fueled FBR.