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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.
Ehud Greenspan, Pavel Hejzlar, Hiroshi Sekimoto, Georgy Toshinsky, David Wade
Nuclear Technology | Volume 151 | Number 2 | August 2005 | Pages 177-191
Technical Paper | Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management - Fuel Management of Reactors Other Than Light Water Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3642
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fast reactors cooled by lead or lead-bismuth alloy offer new interesting fuel cycle and fuel management options by virtue of the superb neutronics and safety features of these heavy liquid metal (HLM) coolants. One option is once-for-life cores having relatively low power density. These cores are fueled in the factory; there is no refueling or fuel shuffling on site. A second option is very long-life cores being made of a fissioning zone and a natural uranium blanket zone. The fissioning zone very slowly drifts toward the blanket. A third option is multirecycling of light water reactor (LWR) discharged fuel without partitioning of transuranics (TRUs) in fuel-self-sustaining reactors. LWR spent fuel could provide the initial fuel loading after extracting fission products and ~90% of its uranium. The makeup fuel is natural or depleted uranium. A fourth option is the high-burnup once-through fuel cycle using natural or depleted uranium feed. The initial fuel loading of this reactor is a mixture of enriched and natural uranium. The natural uranium utilization is 10 to 20 times higher than that of a once-through LWR. A fifth option is transmutation of TRUs from LWRs using critical HLM-cooled reactors; such reactors could be designed to have the same high actinide burning capability of accelerator-driven systems and have comparable safety, but at a substantially lower cost. These novel reactor designs and fuel management options are hereby reviewed.