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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.
Jun Chen, Humberto E. Garcia, Jong Suk Kim, Shannon M. Bragg-Sitton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 195 | Number 2 | August 2016 | Pages 143-156
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-130
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear hybrid energy systems (NHESs) have been proposed as an effective element to incorporate high penetration of clean energy (e.g., nuclear and renewable). This paper focuses on the operations optimization of two specific NHES configurations to address the variability raised from wholesale electricity markets and renewable generation. Both analytical and numerical approaches are used to obtain the optimal operations schedule. Key economic figures of merit are evaluated under optimized and constant (i.e., time-invariant) operations to demonstrate the benefit of the optimization, which also suggests the economic viability of the considered NHESs under the proposed operations optimizer. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis on commodity prices is conducted for better understanding of the considered NHESs.