Status and trend of core design activities for heavy metal cooled accelerator driven system
Résumé
During the 5th Framework Program (FP5) the European Commission (EC) funded the PDS-XADS project (Preliminary
Design Studies on an eXperimental Accelerator Driven System) mainly devoted to the demonstration of the feasibility
of the coupling among an accelerator, a spallation target and a subcritical core, and to preliminarily investigate the conditions
for enhancing the transmutation rate at values suitable for an industrial-scale transmuter.
The on-going activities of the FP6 EUROTRANS integrated project (EUROpean research programme for TRANSmutation
of high level nuclear waste in an accelerator driven system) are in continuity with the PDS-XADS project objectives,
but with a significant change for what concerns the final goal in terms of demonstration level. In fact they are oriented to
both the design of an industrial-scale transmuter (EFIT) and a small experiment facility (XT-ADS), serving as a test bench
for as much component technologies as possible in a realistic irradiation environment.
The paper describes the main results of the design activities for the large and small LBE-cooled cores performed within
PDS-XADS project and discusses the constraints (e.g. those deriving from the spallation target and the accelerator), the
requirements (such as the degree of subcriticality when operating at power as well as during refuelling), the design criteria
and choices with the purpose to verify their applicability to new designs (EFIT, XT-ADS).