Fast Reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems Knowledge Base

Conference Article: Complex reactor physics investigations of thorium containing liquid fuel

Abstract

The great progress in the development of new accelerators has substantially contributed to a new possibility of a practical solution of nuclear waste issue on the basis of transmutation. For an adoption of the given region of problems and a start of an own contribution to its solution in specific conditions of Czech nuclear power program, the first stage of investigation was performed in the Nuclear Research Institute Rez plc., the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Research and Development Basis of the SKODA, Nuclear Machinery Ltd. with an assistance of the Czech Power Generating Board during the years 1994 -1996. Two special conferences were organized by their initiative in June 1994 and September 1995 which made an inventory of abilities and interests of Czech scientific, research and industrial institutions to take share in the solution of this problem. The construction of a nuclear power plant - transmuter, where the possibility to reach critical state is excluded and, simultaneously, the continuous separation of short-lived as well as of long-lived isotopes (including actinides) from the primary fuel-coolant circuit is made possible, is the goal. The key part of such a system will be, besides an accelerator and devices of a mechanical and chemical reprocessing, a subcritical reactor system containing a variety of fuel materials among them even Th containing components on which we have been focusing our work from the point of view of new proliferation resistant technologies. In the framework of the Czech national project of a transmuter called LA-0, there is a close collaboration assumed with a series of leading foreign laboratories with whom a very fruitful contacts have already been established.

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Reference:

Proceedings of three IAEA meetings held in Vienna in 1997, 1998 and 1999

International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna (Austria)

IAEA-TECDOC--1319, pp:221-236