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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.
Muneerah A. Al-Aqeel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 4 | April 2025 | Pages 742-754
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2355405
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In modern life, cement products have become an essential material for the foundations in many structural building designs. Because of this, the natural effects of this material need to be tested and cannot be ignored. Modeling interactions of gamma rays with several cementitious compounds is the focus of this study. Gamma radiations exist naturally and artificially, but with limited gamma-ray energies, which are not easy to access for experimental gamma attenuation studies. So in the current work, a wide range of low gamma-ray energies (0.01 to 0.356 MeV) are applied to investigate the gamma radiation attenuation properties theoretically for different cement materials. Also, the Monte Carlo statistical method is applied using the Geant4 toolkit to simulate the results.
The outcomes are compared with theoretical values using XCOM to validate at these energies. The effective atomic number (), electron density (), and half-value layers (HVLs) for the studied samples are computed based on the simulated mass attenuation coefficient (), as expected. The outcomes show good agreement between the simulated results with those calculated theoretically by XCOM within an 11% deviation.
The silica fume sample showed a slightly higher value compared with the other samples. The dependence of the photon energy and cement composition on the values of the and HVLs are investigated and discussed. In addition, the values of and for all cement samples behaved similarly in the given photon energy range, and they decreased as the photon energy increased.