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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.
Mathieu Picard, Camille Baelden, You Wu, Le Chang, Alexander H. Slocum
Nuclear Technology | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2014 | Pages 200-217
Technical Paper | Miscellaneous | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uranium present in low concentration in ocean water has the potential to greatly augment the current fuel reserve for nuclear power generation, but the challenge of extracting it economically remains. Two new designs of seawater uranium extraction systems are proposed in this paper—a stationary system and a continuous system—both of which utilize a braided polymer adsorbent. The stationary system simplifies the recovery procedure, and it is predicted to produce uranium at $326/kg. The continuous system is attached to an offshore wind turbine system to eliminate the need for additional mooring and increase the overall energy-gathering ability of the wind farm system. This system could maximize the adsorbent yield and achieve a production cost of $403/kg of uranium.