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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.
Gregory J. Van Tuyle, Michael Todosow, Marcia J. Geiger, Arnold L. Aronson, H. Takahashi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 101 | Number 1 | January 1993 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Waste Management Special / Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34764
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A means of transmuting key long-lived nuclear wastes, primarily the minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium) and iodine, using a hybrid proton accelerator and subcritical lattice, is proposed. By partitioning the components of the light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel and by transmuting key elements, such as the plutonium, the minor actinides, and a few of the long-lived fission products, some of the most significant challenges in building a waste repository can be substantially reduced. The proposed machine, based on the described PHOENIX Concept, would transmute the minor actinides and the iodine produced by 75 LWRs and would generate usable electricity (beyond that required to run the large accelerator) of 850 MW(electric).