Study of the fuel behavior, safety characteristics and transmutation performance of a gas cooled accelerator driven system (ADS)

The neutronic behavior of an ADS system based on gas cooling is examined in this work by using the simulation tools MCNPX and ORIGEN. The main character of the MCNPX code is the use of the Monte-Carlo method allowing a high dimensional simulation of the physical processes. The whole model of the core is represented in 3 dimensional zones including the target structure, which provides the initial spallation neutrons for the chain reaction in the fuel zone. At the beginning, MOX fuel with 19.5 wt. Pu/(Pu+U) is loaded in order to investigate the technical feasibility of a test facility. The fuel assemblies are replaced step by step with Plutonium and minor actinides (PuMa) uranium free fuel according to a loading and shuffling pattern. The designed test facility consists of 120 fuel assemblies each 91 fuel rods which are arranged around the spallation target. For a thermal power of 100 MW the burn-up and transmutation rate is studied. The first results for the MOX and partially PuMa fuel loaded core are presented in this paper. For the PuMa fuel two compositions are investigated. Both fuel types chosen for the analysis demonstrate the capability of the incineration of americium. The simulations show that the initial composition has significant influence on the transmutation rate. The deployment of MOX type fuel in the ADS core causes a considerable consumption of Pu but also a significant generation of americium