Speaker
Dr
Amer A. Al Qaaod
(Postdoc fellowship)
Description
The transmutation of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) for nuclear waste management attracted attention of many countries, and is a subject of current research in many European and national project[1][2]. This interest comes from the increase of accumulated nuclear waste due to operation of nuclear power plants, and the needs to minimize the environmental and proliferation threats. Innovative nuclear reactor concepts like accelerator driven systems (ADS) are currently in development that predict to play an effective role in the transmutation process of transuranium elements, in particular of minor actinides (MA) and Long Lived Fission Product (LLFP) to reduce the radiotoxicity risk [3].
In this study, the effect of high level radioactive waste distribution on the neutron characteristics like subcritical multiplication parameters and source efficiency are numerically investigated in three different configurations for simple model of Accelerator Driven System (ADS) reactor consist of two zones, inner region with fast neutron spectra and outer region with thermal neutron spectra, and the subcritical core coupled with external neutron source. The calculations are conducted by using Monte Carlo N-particle Transport code.
[1] L. García, J. Pérez, C. García, A. Escrivá, J. Rosales, and A. Abánades, “Calculation of the packing fraction in a pebble-bed ADS and redesigning of the Transmutation Advanced Device for Sustainable Energy Applications (TADSEA),” Nucl. Eng. Des., vol. 253, pp. 142–152, 2012.
[2] D. De Bruyn, H. A. Abderrahim, P. Baeten, and P. Leysen, “The MYRRHA ADS Project in Belgium Enters the Front End Engineering Phase,” Phys. Procedia, 2015.
[3] P. K. Zhivkov, “Energy Production and Transmutation of Nuclear Waste by Accelerator Driven Systems,” in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2018.
Primary author
Dr
Amer A. Al Qaaod
(Postdoc fellowship)
Co-author
Dr
Volodymyr Gulik
(Researcher at Institute for Nuclear Research, Ukraine)
