Accelerator driven systems for transmutation: Safety considerations and analyses of EFIT type cores

Abstract

European R&D for Accelerator Driven System (ADS) design and fuel development in the 6th EC Framework Programme is driven by the Intgrated Project EUROTRANS. In EUROTRANS two ADS design routes are followed, the XT-ADS and the EFIT. The XT-ADS is designed to provide the experimental demonstration of transmutation in an. The longer-term EFIT development (European Facility for Industrial Transmutation) aims at a generic conceptual design of a full transmuter. Within EUROTRANS, the domain 3 (DM3) named 'AFTRA', is responsible for a deeper assessment of the behavior of the dedicated fuels and for development of the fuel database for the EFIT core design. To test and assess the behavior of the currently chosen CERCER (MgO-matrix) and CERMET (Mo-matrix) fuels under normal operation and transient conditions, the AFTRA domain has performed some preliminary core design studies on an EFIT (coined AFTRA-EFIT). In this paper, design data and transient analyses of multi-zone high/lower power density cores are presented and important safety phenomena are analyzed.