Nuclear waste transmutation performance assessment of an accelerator driven subcritical reactor for waste transmutation (ADS-NWT)

As a concept of lead-bismuth cooled accelerator driven sub-critical reactor, ADS-NWT was proposed for nuclear waste transmutation by FDS Team. In this paper, preliminary transmutation performance assessment on ADS-NWT was performed by using metallic dispersion fuel and metal alloy fuel. The studies were committed to improving the Discharge Transmutation Support Ratio (DTSR) under three key design constraints. Subject to the design constraints on the effective multiplication factor, the peak linear power and the peak fast neutron fluence, the design studies had been performed for ADS-NWT blanket. From these studies, the results showed that the maximum DTSR was primarily related to the MA/Pu ratio, the peak fast neutron fluence and fuel design under imposed design constraints. The maximum DTSR could be ∼47 in one refueling cycle time when the thermal power was fixed to 1000 MW and the effective multiplication factor was 0.98 based on the specific design.