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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.
Yuichiro Asano, Noriko Asanuma, Toshihiko Ito, Makoto Kataoka, Shinya Fujino, Tomoo Yamamura, Wataru Sugiyama, Hiroshi Tomiyasu, Kunihiko Mizumachi, Yasuhisa Ikeda, Yukio Wada, Masami Asou
Nuclear Technology | Volume 120 | Number 3 | December 1997 | Pages 198-210
Technical Paper | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35411
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new reprocessing system for spent nuclear fuels based on a precipitation method is proposed to recover uranium and transuranium elements from spent nuclear fuels in high ratios and to achieve extreme safety without any potential dangers. Experiments were carried out for a simulated fuel solution containing uranium and 17 major elements. The main reprocessing processes are as follows: (a) dissolution of U02 fuel under mild conditions; (b) neutralization of the dissolved fuel solution with Na2C03-NaHC03 mixed solutions, followed by the separation of precipitated fission products by centrifugation; (c) separation of cesium by a precipitation method using a tetraphenylborate ion; and (d) recovery of uranium (U) as a precipitate of the hydrolyzed compound from an alkaline solution. As a result, 99.95% of the U was recovered with the least amount of fission products, i.e., 10-5 g or even less in the recovered 1 g of U with the only exceptions being zirconium and molybdenum.