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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.
Cheol Ho Pyeon, Hiroyuki Nakano, Masao Yamanaka, Takahiro Yagi, Tsuyoshi Misawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 181-190
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Kyoto University Critical Assembly, a series of reactor physics experiments on the accelerator-driven system (ADS) coupled with the fixed-field alternating gradient (FFAG) accelerator are carried out, and the spallation neutrons generated by 100-MeV protons from the FFAG accelerator are successfully injected into the cores. In the ADS experiments, the neutron characteristics of the solid target are investigated through static and kinetic analyses, when the external neutron source of the neutron spectrum (the W, W-Be, or Pb-Bi target) is varied. The results demonstrate that the neutron yield is large with the W target, but a discrepancy is observed between the experiments and the calculations, because the experimental uncertainty of proton monitoring is attributable to defocusing of proton beams. With the use of reaction rate distribution in the core region, the static parameters are estimated fairly well in the analyses of the neutron multiplication and subcritical multiplication factor. In the kinetic experiments, the variation of the solid target used is clearly evident in the prompt neutron decay constant and the subcriticality.