ACCELERATOR DRIVEN SYSTEMS
Reactor
design
The Accelerator Driven System's (ADS) concept has been proposed by Carlos Rubbia, an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. He called it Energy Amplifier, because the small amount of energy (1.3%) necessary to run the accelerator generates much more energy by the fission of nuclear material.
The accelerator, which can be linear or cyclotron, delivers and accelerates protons that are projected on a target composed of lead (Pb) or Pb-Li. The collision of 1 GeV proton produces about 30 neutrons by spallation of the metal. Those neutrons fertilise the Th232 blanket and fission the generated U233. The blanket can be solid or liquid as in MSR.
The Accelerator Driven System's (ADS) concept has been proposed by Carlos Rubbia, an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. He called it Energy Amplifier, because the small amount of energy (1.3%) necessary to run the accelerator generates much more energy by the fission of nuclear material.
The accelerator, which can be linear or cyclotron, delivers and accelerates protons that are projected on a target composed of lead (Pb) or Pb-Li. The collision of 1 GeV proton produces about 30 neutrons by spallation of the metal. Those neutrons fertilise the Th232 blanket and fission the generated U233. The blanket can be solid or liquid as in MSR.
Inherent
security of ADS
The security of those reactors is very high
because the criticality coefficient (k) is kept far under 1
all the time. For information, the criticality of traditional reactors
(PWR or BWR) varies constantly between 0.994 and 1.006, and above 1,
the processe of explosive fission begins...