Humans looking for affordable energies and sufficient alternative for fossil fuels for decades. Growing need for energy, produce more electrical energy, traort and many other needs that all of them are associated to electrical energy, forced human to develop nuclear energy as more as possible. Scientist’s estimation of extractable uranium from mines around the world shows that these resources of uranium are being depleted rapidly. One of these fuels, which exists much more than uranium around the world, is thorium. In this work, production methods of thorium- uranium pellet have been investigated and this fuel has been produced for first time in IRAN. In this work, production method is powdery and addition of uranium has been done by saturation method. This method, because of using uranium 233 (is hazardous) has been presented under harsh condition. Saturation method has been done by using uranium nitrate solution. Then the pellets were placed in reducing furnace for final sintering. Effect of various additives in the pellets, exerting pressure in raw pellets and residence time of pellets in furnace, are the cases that have been studied. XRF, XRD, ICP, BET and density test have been done on powder and final produced pellet and results have been compared with other researches. The pellet with dextrin was destruction during impregnation. The pellets with PEG showed good results in impregnation technique. The final density of the pellet was in the range of 90–95% of the theoretical density. Uranium concentrations in the pellet after impregnation obtained around 8% in ICP test and uranium titration. The characterization of the sintered pellets was made by optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The grain structure of pellet with MgO was uniform with suitable porosity. The pellet with PEG polymer showed uniform morphology with microscopy fracture. Keywords : Uranium, Thorium, Saturation, Pellet, Uranium nitrate, Nuclear energy, Fuel cycle.
