The US accelerator transmutation of waste program

A national project to develop a future capability to separate actinides and long-lived fission products from spent fuel, to transmute them, and to dis pose off the remaining waste in optimal waste forms has begun in the United States. This project is based on the Accelerator-driven Transmutation of W aste (ATW) program developed during the 1990s at Los Alamos National Labora tory. and has its technological roots in several technologies that have bee n developed by the multi-mission laboratories of the U.S. Department of Ene rgy (DOE). In the Fiscal Year 1999 Energy and Water Appropriation Act. the U.S. Congress directed the DOE to study ATW and by the end of FY99 to prepa re a "roadmap" for developing this technology. DOE convened a steering comm ittee. assembled four technical working groups consisting of members from m any national laboratories. and consulted with several individual internatio nal and national experts. The finished product. "A Roadmap for Developing A TW Technology A Report to Congress," recommends a five-year $281 M. science -based, technical-risk-reduction program. This paper provides an overview o f the U.S. Roadmap for developing ATW technology. the organization of the n ational ATW Project, the critical issues in subsystems and technological op tions, deployment scenarios. institutional challenges, and academic and int ernational collaboration. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.