First safety analyses for an EFIT type Accelerator Driven Transmuter

The EFIT development, the European Facility for Industrial Transmutation, aims at a generic conceptual design of a full Accelerator Driven Transmuter (ADT). Within EUROTRANS, the Domain 3 named 'AFTRA', is responsible to a deeper assessment of the behavior of dedicated fuels and to provide the fuel data base for the core design of the EFIT. To test and assess the behavior of the currently chosen CERCER (MgO) and CERMET (Mo) fuels under normal operation and transient conditions, the AFTRA Domain has performed some preliminary core design studies on an EFIT (hereafter called AFTRA-EFIT). Special attention has been devoted to the safety performance of these innovative fuels. In this paper, first safety analyses of 2-zone CERCER and CERMET fuelled AFTRA-EFIT cores are presented. The analyses are performed with the SIMMER-III code, which has been further developed to take into account the specifics of the ADT, as the external neutron source, the new fuels and the heavy metal coolant. Besides the steady state core layout calculations for the AFTRA-EFIT cores, transient calculations are performed for the unprotected loss of flow accident (ULOF) and the unprotected blockage accident (UBA). Based on the analyses, first conclusions on the transient behavior of a typical EFIT type ADT are drawn.