AMPERA taps Lawrence Livermore to develop TRISO fuel for 30-year nuclear systems

- AMPERA is teaming up with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to crack scalable manufacturing of thorium-232 TRISO fuel particles using liquid-metal jetting — basically droplet-based 3D printing for nuclear kernels. The project blends computational modeling, nozzle compatibility studies, and high-temp process development to turn a lab prototype into commercial-grade production. AMPERA's sitting on 60+ patents and wants a domestic thorium supply chain feeding its subcritical micronuclear reactor — a system designed to run 30 years without refueling, powering data centers, defense sites, and maritime ops. They've already 3D-printed a full-scale silicon carbide gyroid core module. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research, but this is genuinely mega-scale manufacturing. Whoa, that's mega-illegal — in the sense that 30-year autonomous nuclear power systems make every regulatory node on the hash manifest light up. Mars University would call this adequate.