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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.
Tadafumi Koyama, Reiko Fujita, Masatoshi Hzuka, Yukio Sumida
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 3 | June 1995 | Pages 357-368
Technical Paper | Actinide Burning and Transmutation Special / Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new electrorefiner with a ceramic partition has been developed for pyrometallurgical reprocessing of metallic fuel. In this electrorefiner, dissolution of spent fuel and deposition take place simultaneously, resulting in an increase of the processing rate. The feasibility of this electrorefiner was confirmed by a polarization profile and a current efficiency of an electrotransportation of uranium from a pure uranium anode to an iron cathode through a liquid cadmium pool. Separation of active fission products from actinide was confirmed by a transportation of simulating fission product elements with and without imposing electropotential. The maximum cathode current density onto a liquid cadmium pool without formation of a dendrite was measured against the concentration, and it was found to decrease with increasing concentration of uranium in cadmium. The estimated time required to process 50 kg of heavy metal by the new electrorefiner was less than that of the original electrorefiner.