Review of the European project - Impact of Accelerator-Based Technologies on Nuclear Fission Safety (IABAT)

The IABAT project - Impact of Accelerator Based Technologies on Nuclear Fis sion Safety - started in 1996 in the frame of 4(th) Framework Programme of the European Union, R&D specific programme "Nuclear fission safety 1994-199 8", area A.2 "Exploring innovative approaches/Fuel cycle concepts," as one of the first common European activities in ADS. The project was completed O ctober 31, 1999. The overall objective of the IABAT project has been a prel iminary assessment of the potential of Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) for transmutation of nuclear waste and for nuclear energy production with mini mum waste generation. Moreover, more specific topics related to nuclear dat a and code development for ADS have been studied in more detail. Four ADSs have been studied for different fuel/coolant combinations: liquid metal coo lant and solid fuel, liquid metal coolant and dispersed fuel, and fast and thermal molten salt systems. Target studies comprised multiple target solut ions and radiation damage problems in a target environment. In a tool devel opment part of the project a methodology of subcriticality monitoring has b een developed based on Feynman-alpha and Rossi-alpha methods. Moreover, a n ew Monte-Carlo burnup code taking full advantage of continuous neutron cros s-section data has been developed and benchmarked. Impact on the risk from high-level waste repositories fi om radiotoxicity reduction using ADS has b een assessed giving no crystal-clear benefits of ADS for repository radioto xicity reduction but concluding some important prerequisites for effective transmutation. In proliferation studies important differences between criti cal reactors and ADS have been underlined and non-proliferation measures ha ve been proposed. In assessment of accelerator technology costing models ha ve been created that allow the circular and linear accelerator options to b e compared and the effect of parameter variations examined. The calculation s reported show that cyclotron systems would be more economical, due mainly to the advantage of the cost of RF power supplies. However, the accelerato r community regards with skepticism the possibility of transporting and ext racting more than a 10mA beam current from a 1GeV cyclotron and therefore t echnical factors may limit the application of cyclotrons. Finally, this rev iew summarizes development of nuclear data in the energy region between 20 Mev and 150 MeV. Neutron and proton transport data files for Fe, Ni, Pb, Th , U-238 and Pu-239 have been created. The high-energy part of the data file s consists completely of results from model calculations, which are benchma rked against the available experimental data. Although there is obviously f uture work left regarding fine-tuning of several parts of the data files, t he representation of nuclear reaction information up to 150 MeV is already better than can be attained with intranuclear cascade codes. (C) 2001 Elsev ier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.