Accelerator driven nuclear energy and transmutation systems

Nuclear power generation has been a mature industry for many years. However, despite the overall safety record and the great attractions of nuclear power, especially in times of concern about green house gases emissions, there continues to be some lack of public acceptance of this technology. This sensitivity to nuclear power has several elements in addition to the concern of a potential nuclear accident. These include the possible diversion of plutonium into nuclear weapon production and the concern about the long term storage of plutonium and other transuranic elements. A concept which seeks to allay these fears but still takes advantage of the nuclear fuel cycle and utilises decades of research and development in this technology, is the idea of using modern accelerators to transmute the long lived radio nuclides and simultaneously generate power. A review of the novel concepts for energy production and transmutation of isotopes will be presented. Of the various proposals, the most developed is the Energy Amplifier Concept promoted by Rubbia. The possibility of using high-energy, high-current accelerators to produce large fluxes of neutrons has been known since the earliest days of accelerator technology. E.O. Lawrence, for example, promoted the concept of producing nuclear material with such an accelerator. The Canadians in the early 50s considered using accelerators to produce fuel for their heavy water reactors and there were well advanced designs for a device called the Intense Neutron Generator. The speculative idea of using accelerator produced neutrons for the transmutation of transuranic elements (i.e. elements such as neptunium plutonium and other elements with higher Z atomic number) has also been studied extensively, notably at a number of laboratories in the US, Europe and Japan. However at this time, all facilities that have actually been constructed have been designed primarily for condensed matter studies i.e. studies of the structural properties of materials. These include the ISIS facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory, USA, the SINQ facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland and the KENS facility at the KEK laboratory, Japan. Such experimental facilities, with the possible exception of SINQ, have relatively low accelerator beam power and would not be suitable for a serious study of transmutation or ultimately energy production. However, they have provided extremely valuable data which can be used in the design of more powerful facilities. In recent years, accelerator technology has advanced to such an extent that the possibility of building a proof of principle facility which explores, experimentally, ideas in transmutation and energy production, has become viable and proposals exist for several different plants