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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.
Fan Zhang, J. Wesley Hines, Jamie B. Coble
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 939-950
Technical Paper – Special section on the 2019 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1666599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Most nuclear power plants (NPPs) under construction or under design are expected to deploy largely digital instrumentation and control (I&C) systems. Current fleets are increasingly looking toward converting to digital I&C systems due to the advantages of precise control, economic operation, and ease of procurement over conventional analog I&C systems. With all the benefits digital I&C systems bring, challenging cybersecurity concerns are introduced as well. Cyberattacks targeted at industrial control systems have grown in both frequency and capability in recent years. Despite efforts to air-gap digital I&C systems, NPPs can be vulnerable to these cyberattacks, as evidenced by recent cyber incidents at nuclear facilities. Cybersecurity of NPPs should be addressed in three complementary thrusts: cyberattack prevention, detection, and response. Considering the requirements of digital I&C systems, we propose a novel cybersecurity solution platform that consists of a data collection and extraction system, a multilayer cyberattack detection system, a cause analysis system with dynamic risk assessment, a cyberattack response system, and a main control room display system. This architecture also promotes cooperation between information technology experts and the operation technology team to improve cybersecurity by integrating process data together with traditional host system and network data in a unified platform. This paper presents the proposed cybersecurity architecture and demonstrates its efficacy with a simulated cyberattack on a cyber-physical system testbed. Together with traditional intrusion prevention methods and rule-based intrusion detection systems, this platform provides a solution for prevention, detection, and response to cyberattacks that is congruous with the defense-in-depth strategies of other NPP safety and security systems.