MYRRHA: Preliminary front-end engineering design

•Summary of the preliminary front-end engineering design of MYRRHA.•Purposes and applications of the MYRRHA project.•Description of the primary system, accelerator and plant layout of MYRRHA.•Current design of the fast research reactor MYRRHA cooled with LBE.

The MYRRHA project started in 1998 by SCK•CEN. MYRRHA is an MTR, based on the ADS concept, for material and fuel research, for studying the feasibility of transmutation of Minor Actinides and Long-Lived Fission Products arising from radioactive waste reprocessing and finally for demonstrating at a reasonable power scale the principle of the ADS. The MYRRHA design has progressed through various framework programmes of the European Commission in the context of Partitioning and Transmutation. The design has now entered into the Front End Engineering Phase (FEED) covering the period 2012–2015. The engineering company, which will handle this phase, has been selected and the works have begun in the late 2013. In the mean time we have made some refinements in both primary systems and plant layout, including the reactor building design. In this paper, we present the most recent developments of the MYRRHA design as existing today.