Thorium fuel tops 60 GWd/MTU in lab irradiation tests

At Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor, a thorium-based fuel has crossed a demanding testing milestone: Clean Core Thorium Energy says its ANEEL fuel reached above 60 GWd/MTU in accelerated irradiation tests. The result brings the fuel closer to a demonstration in an existing CANDU reactor, rather than a trial that would wait for a new reactor design.

ANEEL combines thorium with enriched uranium, including low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium variants. Clean Core says the approach could improve fuel utilization, reduce long-lived spent-fuel volumes and strengthen safety and proliferation-resistance characteristics. It is also designed to work with existing water-cooled reactors, including pressurized heavy water reactors, Generation IV reactors and light water reactors.

The program is now adding an outside technical review. Kinectrics will examine the fuel’s design, manufacturing process, safety case and regulatory readiness. At the same time, BWXT Canada is working on the CANDU fuel-bundle hardware, while Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is fabricating full-scale, reactor-ready ANEEL bundles.

So what changes in practice? If the testing, manufacturing and review stages are completed successfully, utilities could test a thorium-based fuel in established nuclear infrastructure instead of waiting for an entirely new reactor system. Clean Core says ANEEL could enter existing CANDU reactors without major modifications. That remains a proposed pathway, not an operating deployment.

The milestone is therefore a bridge between laboratory irradiation and reactor demonstration. The burnup result comes from testing at Idaho National Laboratory, while the independent assessment by Kinectrics is still ahead. The engineering assessment of ANEEL’s performance, safety characteristics and reactor compatibility was published in Nuclear Engineering and Design.