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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.
Ross Hays, Paul Turinsky
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 1 | April 2014 | Pages 76-89
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-68
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The process of transitioning from the current once-through nuclear fuel cycle to a hypothetical closed fuel cycle necessarily introduces a much greater degree of supply feedback and complexity. When considering such advanced technologies, it is necessary to consider when and how fuel cycle facilities can be deployed in order to avoid resource conflicts while maximizing certain stakeholder values. A multiobjective optimization capability was developed around the VISION nuclear fuel cycle simulation code to allow for the automated determination of optimum deployment scenarios and objective trade-off surfaces for dynamic fuel cycle transition scenarios. A parallel simulated annealing optimization framework with modular objective function definitions is utilized to maximize computational power and flexibility. Three sample objective functions representing a range of economic and sustainability goals are presented, as well as representative optimization results demonstrating both robust convergence toward a set of optimum deployment configurations and a consistent set of trade-off surfaces.