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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.
Baiba V. Harrington, Geoffrey Constantine
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 1 | January 1995 | Pages 11-20
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A calculational model of the entire core of the DIDO class reactor HIFAR has been used to analyze epithermal neutron beam experiments. In the experiments, an off-center fuel element was replaced by a dummy fuel element voided by a dry liner in which an aluminium spectrum shifter was suspended at core center to extract the beam. Various combinations of the filter materials aluminum, iron, sulfur, titanium, and cadmium were inserted near the top of the dry liner, and liquid argon was placed in a cryostat above the dummy element. Reaction rates were measured in a fission chamber, sandwiched between various thicknesses of polyethylene, in order to assess the accuracy of the calculational model for different regions of the neutron energy spectrum of the beam. The neutron source distribution of the HIFAR core was obtained from a three-dimensional diffusion calculation, with burnup-dependent fuel compositions and fission products included, using the AUS modular code scheme. Argon cross sections were generated from ENDL-84 data and resonance parameters taken from Neutron Cross Sections (1984). A whole-core MCNP source calculation was used to analyze the experiments giving good agreement between measured and calculated reaction rates. This whole-core model of HIFAR may be applied with confidence to predict the performance of filtered beams for boron neutron capture therapy and also to other HIFAR calculations.