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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.
Hiroshi Akie, Tadasumi Muromura, Hideki Takano, Shojiro Matsuura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 107 | Number 2 | August 1994 | Pages 182-192
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT107-182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the burning of plutonium derived from nuclear warheads, once-through type oxide fuels have been studied by considering their proliferation resistance and environmental safety as well as their technological backgrounds of fuel fabrication and reactors. From phase relations of ceramic materials and their chemical properties, it seems that a two-phase mixture of a fluorite-type phase and alumina has favorable characteristics as a once-through-type fuel of plutonium burning. It also seems that the fluorite-type phases such as thoria and fully stabilized zirconia are acceptable as host phases of plutonium because of high solid solubility of the actinide elements and fission products, irradiation stability, and chemical stability. The spent fuels finally obtained will become mineral-like waste forms, which could be buried under deep geological formations without further processing. From reactor burnup calculations with the use of the fuels, light water reactors (LWRs) with the larger volume ratio of moderator to fuel than 1.4, such as conventional LWRs, are considered to be suitable for the once-through plutonium burning. Furthermore, such LWRs can transmute nearly 99% of 239Pu and 85% of initial loaded weapons-grade plutonium. The quality of plutonium becomes completely poor in the spent fuels.