Energy efficiency is a major criterion for modern economic decision-making. However, in matter of nuclear energy, the costs of nuclear waste disposal are generally externalized by passing them to the environment or to future generations. In this study, we investigate the impact of the accelerator on the overall efficiency of an Accelerator Driven Sub-critical Reactor aimed for nuclear waste...
Throughout mankind’s existence it has been impossible to mine nuclear weapons material directly from the earth. Although natural uranium can be mined, separating the 235 U still requires difficult and expensive technology and time. And even if 235 U is obtained by isotopic enrichment, it can be rendered useless for weapons simply by mixing it with natural uranium and returning it to the earth....
Electrical demand world-wide is likely to increase at 100 GWe per year for the next 50-100 years. The vast majority of this will occur in the developing world where they will install the cheapest electricity as soon as they can afford it. Currently that is coal. In order to change this forecast we must invent a power generator that is cheaper than coal and can be massively and rapidly...
Over the past eight years, the Virginia Tech group has been working on the design and analysis of the GEM*STAR concept. This is a Molten Salt fueled Accelerator-Driven Subcritical Reactor (MS-ADSR) that uses a graphite moderator and a proton accelerator with a uranium target.
In previous analysis of the GEM*STAR reactor system, several simplifying assumptions were made about the neutronics...
Beam stability and overall reliability of the Accelerator systems are major concerns in ADS technology. Short beam interruptions can induce high thermo-mechanical stress and fatigue in the reactor structure. Beam stops lead also to safety related procedures reducing the reactor availability.
In the Myrrha project, the main reliability requirement is to reduce the number of short beam...
Neutron spallation is an efficient process for producing intense neutron fluxes that can be exploited in Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactors (ADSRs) for energy production and the transmutation of nuclear waste. In order to assess the feasibility of spallation driven fission and transmutation we have simulated proton induced neutron production using GEANT4, initially benchmarking our...
The international Thorium Energy Committee (iThEC), a not for profit association, under Swiss law, was founded in 2012. Its members are engineers, physicists, and other concerned citizens acting to promote R&D on the use of thorium in order to transmute nuclear waste and produce safe, clean and abundant energy. To meet the tremendous world energy needs, systematic R&D has to be pursued to...
The research on Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) has more than 20 year’s tradition at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Since 2010, the most experiments have been performed with a spallation target composed of 512 kg of natural uranium QUINTA irradiated with proton and deuteron beams of high energies. Currently, final preparations of a new spallation target BURAN consisting of 20 tons...
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Reliability of high power neutron sources is difficult to predict; however, there are ways to drive the design towards high reliability performance. In this contribution, the tools, methods and experiences from some of these facilities will be presented.
The European Spallation Source (ESS) is a high brightness source of slow neutrons which is currently under construction in Sweden. ESS uses a linear accelerator to accelerate protons to 2000MeV. The superconducting cavities of the accelerator are supplied with power by a radio-frequency (r.f.) distribution system. The design, construction and operation of this r.f. system will provide...
Fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators are proving to be a highly promising candidate for next-generation 10 MW-class high power proton drivers due to recent advances in design which demonstrate continuous (CW) operation combined with stable, 2-4 m long straight sections allowing insertion of high-gradient RF. The resulting 1-GeV ‘FFAG cyclotron’ thus supports a continuous (CW) beam...
High energy particle accelerators with continuous wave or long-pulse accelerating fields (or gradients) above a few million volts per meter (MV m−1) will be of much interest in the context of the future ADS programs. In such applications niobium-based superconducting radio frequency (SCRF) cavities bring various advantages over the conventional copper RF cavities. Here we address the issues...
Energy efficiency is a major criterion for modern economic decision-making. However, in matter of nuclear energy, the costs of nuclear waste disposal are generally externalized by passing them to the environment or to future generations. In this study, we investigate the impact of the accelerator on the overall efficiency of an Accelerator Driven Sub-critical Reactor aimed for nuclear waste...
