Conceptual design of a sub-critical Pb-cooled Accelerator Driven System (ADS) fuelled by (Th-LEU)

The target of this study is to provide information on the actual boundary conditions encountered in the conceptual design of an ADS fuelled by (Th, LEU), as well as their impact on the design itself, on the performances of the system and on the possible solutions from the point of view of the choice of materials, the operating conditions, the neutron design optimization, etc. In this paper rationales and consequences of the (Th, U) fuel cycle adoption, together with the design constraints, are discussed. Identified reference core configuration and the steady state criticality results are also discussed. Stochastic approach for the neutronic evaluations has been adopted.