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Inertia and LLNL accelerate fuel manufacturing
Inertia Enterprises and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a manufacturing process for the thin layer of cryogenically frozen deuterium-tritium (D-T) used in its target design, reducing production time from days to hours, according to the company.
The advance makes target fueling cheaper and reduces the amount of tritium that Inertia would need to hold at a pilot plant, which lowers material handling costs, regulatory burden, and dependence on scarce fuel inventories.
Braden Goddard, Aaron Totemeier
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 696-706
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2145836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The United States and the Russian Federation have agreed to dispose of their excess weapons-grade plutonium, with consuming the material as nuclear fuel in light water reactors for electricity generation often discussed as the best option. Lightbridge Corporation has several thermal reactor fuel designs that offer very high burnups, in the range of 21 at. % or approximately 190 900 MWd/tonne of heavy metal, which make them well suited for consuming excess weapons-grade plutonium. MCNP6.2 computer simulations were performed to quantify the mass of plutonium consumed in a Lightbridge-designed fuel rod compared to traditional mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, as well as the attractiveness of the plutonium in the used fuel for weapons purposes. The results of these simulations show that the Lightbridge plutonium disposition fuel variant consumes approximately 5.5 times more plutonium per fuel rod than MOX fuel and that the material attractiveness of the Lightbridge-used plutonium is noticeably less than that of MOX fuel.