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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.
Lei Jin, Hui He, Xutao Pei, Yu Zhou, Hongguo Hou, Meng Zhang, Shuai He, Yang Gao, Haitao Ma
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 2797-2811
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2025.2461426
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the complex mechanisms in pulsed disk and doughnut columns (PDDCs), traditional empirical functions often fail to make accurate predictions in new datasets, such as different experimental conditions or different PDDC structures, indicating a lack of generalizability. In this work, some machine learning techniques such as random forest regression (RFR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, support vector regression (SVR), and artificial neural network are developed to predict dispersed phase holdup based on experimental data collected from numerous studies. Two training methods were used: One is to randomly divide the collected data into groups for training and testing, and the other is to separate the data of one study for testing and training in data from other studies. These methods were used to compare and analyze the accuracy, generalizability, and stability of these models, using the mean relative error (MRE) as the performance evaluation criterion. SVR has an MRE of 15.0% in the test set and 11.0% in the entire dataset, outperforming other alternative models in both efficiency and ability to mitigate overfitting. Furthermore, the relative importance of each parameter in influencing holdup was analyzed by RFR.