Availability analysis for the 30-MW proton linac of the JAEA-ADS project

Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) is designing a 30-MW proton linear accelerator (linac) as one of the fundamental components for its accelerator-driven subcritical system (ADS) proposal. ADS accelerators demand extremely high reliability and availability to avoid thermal stress in the subcritical reactor structures. Thus, reliability and availability assessments of the accelerator are mandatory to detect weakness in the lattice designed and evaluate redundancy configurations to fulfill the demanded operation. This study applied the Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) method to calculate the Medium Time Between Failures (MTBF) for different linac configurations: all the linac's elements in a series configuration and a combination of hot-standby for the low-energy section of the linac and k-out-of-n redundancy for the high-energy part. The estimation considered the detailed arrangement of the cavities and magnets that compose the linac lattice. In this report, we describe the reliability model of the JAEA-ADS linac, report the MTBF results, and point out the potential route toward operating with the required availability. (author)