General Synthesis Report of the Different ADS Design Status. Establishment of a Catalogue of the R&D needs

This document is a General Synthesis Report of the Different ADS Design Status being designed within the EUROTRANS Integrated Project; an FP6 European commission partially funded programme. This project had the goal to demonstrate the possibility of nuclear waste transmutation/burning in Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) at industrial scale.The focus is on a Pb-cooled ADS for the European Facility on Industrial scale Transmuter (ETD/EFIT) with a back-up solution based on an He cooled ADS.As an intermediate step towards this industrial-scale prototype, an eXperimental Transmuter based on ADS concept (ETD/XT-ADS) able to demonstrate both the feasibility of the ADS concept and to accumulate experience when using dedicated fuel sub-assemblies or dedicated pins within a MOX fuel core has been also studied.The two machines (XT-ADS and Pb cooled EFIT) have been designed in a consistent way bringing more credibility to the potential licensing of these plants and with sufficient details to allow definition of the critical issues as regards design, safety and associated technological and basic R&D needs. The different designs fit rather well with the technical objectives fixed at the beginning of the project in consistency with the European Roadmap on ADS development.For what concerns the accelerator, the superconducting LINAC has been clearly assessed as the most suitable concept for the three reactors in particular with respect to the stringent requirements on reliability. Associated R&D needs have been identified and will be focused on critical components (injector, cryomodule) long term testing.The design of the different ADS has been performed in view of what is reasonably achievable pending the completion of R&D programmes. The way the EUROTRANS Integrated Project has been organised with other domains than the DM1 Design being specifically devoted to R&D tasks in support to the overall ETD/EFIT and ETD/XT-ADS design tasks has been helpful. The other domains were centred on the assessment of reactivity measurement techniques (DM2 ECATS), on the development of U-free dedicated fuels (DM3 AFTRA), on materials behaviour and heavy liquid metal technology (DM4 DEMETRA) and on nuclear data assessment (DM5 NUDATRA). Pending questions associated to technology gaps have been identified through the different appropriate R&D work programmes and a Catalogue of the R&D needs has been established.Finally, the work within the EUROTRANS integrated project has provided an overall assessment of the feasibility at a reasonable cost for an ADS based transmutation so that a decision can be taken to launch a detailed design and construction of the intermediate step Experimental ADS now already launched within the 7th FP programme under the name of Common Design Team (CDT)

Description of the European Helium-Cooled EFIT Plant: An Industrial-Scale Accelerator-Driven System for Minor Actinide Transmutation—II

International audienceIn order to reduce the volume and the radiotoxicityof the nuclear waste coming from the operation of existingpressurized water reactors, accelerator-driven systems(ADSs) have been envisioned.The Helium-cooled (He) European Facility forIndustrial-scale Transmutation (He-EFIT) concept is theEUROpean Research Programme for the TRANSmutationof High Level Nuclear Waste in Accelerator DrivenSystem (EUROTRANS) Integrated Project (IP) (EUROTRANSIP) backup option, whereas Pb-cooled EFITis the reference one. The plant has a power of ;400MW(thermal). Like all ADS plants, it consists of threemain components: the accelerator, the spallation targetmodule, and the subcritical core.This paper describes the He-EFIT design at the endof the EUROTRANS IP as well as the studies performedto support this design: spallation performances, trasmutationcapabilities, and plant safety analyses.No specific technology deadlock has been identified,and it might be possible to build such a plant given necessaryresearch and development in support

The PHENIX Final Tests

The 250 MWe (140 MWe since 1993) PHENIX sodium cooled fast reactor was shut down on March 6th, 2009. Before decommissioning, a final set of tests were performed during the May 2009 – January 2010 period covering core physics, fuel behaviour and thermalhydraulics areas. Detailed analysis of the tests results is ongoing. It will be used for the extension of the validation of ERANOS and DARWIN codes for core physics, TRIO_U and CATHARE for thermalhydraulics and GERMINAL for fuel behaviour. In addition, the program included two tests related to the comprehension of the four negative reactivity transients (AURN in French acronym) experienced during the reactor operation in ‘89 and ‘90 and not yet fully explained. This was also a great opportunity to involve young engineers in the different processes like the design of the tests, their carrying out, and the analysis of the results. The standard instrumentation of the reactor was completed by specifically designed devices

Achievements and lessons learned within the Domain 1 "DESIGN" of the IP_EUROTRANS Integrated Project

International audienc