Possibility of using accelerators to burn nuclear wastes

The use of powerful proton accelerators is now contemplated for producing large numbers of neutrons, in order to transmute long lived radionuclides produced inside nuclear reactors. After describing the general background and issues related to nuclear wastes transmutation, the principles of operations and the advantages of such accelerator driven systems (ADS), including a subcritical reactor containing the nuclear wastes, are discussed in terms of neutron economy and safety. Present status of different proposals, originated from Los Alamos, JAERI, CEA and CERN, will be presented. Further developments of such systems call for basic nuclear physics studies in the field of high energy transport codes and related nuclear data acquisition. (author)