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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.
Yasuo Arai, Takashi Iwai, Mitsuo Akabori, Kazuo Minato
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 2 | May 2008 | Pages 244-249
Technical Paper | First International Pyroprocessing Research Conference | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pyrochemical processing has several advantages over conventional wet processing for the treatment of spent nitride fuel. Besides the molten salt electrorefining of nitride fuel, actinide nitride formation in and recovery from the liquid cadmium cathode is a key technology in the nitride fuel cycle with pyrochemical processing. It was found that heating a cadmium alloy containing plutonium and uranium at 973 K under a nitrogen gas stream resulted in the simultaneous nitridation of the actinides and the distillation of cadmium. Furthermore, nitride pellets were prepared from the powder recovered without any milling or granulating process. The results obtained in the present study suggested that the nitride fuel cycle with pyrochemical processing is technologically feasible for transmutation of minor actinides and advanced fast reactors.