New infrastructure for studies of transmutation and fast systems concepts

In this work we report initial studies on a low power Accelerator-Driven System as a possible experimental facility for the measurement of relevant integral nuclear quantities. We simulated an Accelerator Driven System comprising a proton cyclotron with 70 MeV beam energy and 1 mA beam current. The core is made up by 110 fuel assemblies, each hosting 81 fuel rods with a Superphenix-type MOX. We performed Monte Carlo simulations of minor actinides and fission products irradiation and estimated the fission rate within fission chambers in the reactor core and the reflector, in order to evaluate the transmutation rates and the measurement sensitivity. We observed that the percentage transmutation with respect to natural decay is about 10^-2 to 10^-1 % for minor actinides, while for LLFP (long lived fission products) and MLFP (medium lived fission products) is about 10^-3 to 10^-2 %. We also performed a photo-peak analysis of available experimental data from a research reactor, in order to estimate the expected sensitivity of this analysis method on the irradiation of samples in the ADS considered