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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.
Seong Woo Kang, Jae-Hwan Yang, Man-Sung Yim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 1593-1606
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1713680
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this study is to examine the feasibility of using bismuth-embedded SBA-15 (Bi-SBA-15) as gaseous iodine filtration material for applications at higher temperatures, such as environmental release severe accident mitigation, while reducing the cost of production and maintaining its iodine adsorption capacity. It was shown that Bi-SBA-15 can be produced in a much more economically feasible way by (1) increasing the amount of the chemical reagents for SBA-15 synthesis, (2) decreasing the amount of other chemicals required to facilitate the chemical reactions, and (3) reducing the synthesis time, all while maintaining the iodine adsorption capability. Through both closed and open iodine adsorption experiments, it was shown that Bi-SBA-15 has a much higher adsorption capacity than silver-exchanged zeolites at 423°K (150°C) but decreases sharply as the temperature increases, resulting in about half of the iodine adsorption capacity of AgX at 523 K (250°C). Assuming that the commercialized cost of Bi-SBA-15 could be less than half of silver-exchanged zeolites, Bi-SBA-15 may be able to replace silver-exchanged zeolites at higher-temperature applications but only if the temperature of the gaseous iodine is less than 423 K (150°C) or if there is a presystem such as a pool scrubber to reduce the temperature of the gaseous iodine reaching the iodine filtration system. If Bi-SBA-15 can be produced much less expensively at a small fraction of cost compared with silver-exchanged zeolites, it may even be used at a temperature up to 523 K (250°C) with high enough iodine capture efficiency by simply increasing the mass of Bi-SBA-15 to more than double the mass of the required silver-exchanged zeolites.