Nuclear and thermal calculations on a hybrid system combining a proton accelerator and a fission reactor core; Study of energy conversion system

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At present, a high power CW(Continuous Wave) electron linac accelerator is under development in PNC as a part of transmutation study by accelerators. Last year we performed nuclear and thermal calculation on a hybrid reactor system combining the electron linac and a subcritical core with TRU fuel as one of applied uses. It is well known that the hybrid reactor system can also use a proton accelerator instead of the electron one. The nuclear and thermal calculation was performed on the system using the proton accelerator in this year. Comparison of the extinguished quantity of TRU fuel was performed between calculation results of both systems. In the proton linac hybrid system, a proton beam accelerated from the linac is injected into a target located in the center of the subcritical core to produce neutrons by spallation reactions. The neutrons enter the surrounding subcritical core to extinguish the TRU. The result of calculation showed that the extinguished quantity of TRU was about 10 kg where the proton beam power of 100 MW injected into the subcritical core system of keff = 0.95 over 1 year. The extinguished quantity of TRU was about 100 times as large as that in the case studied last year on the electron linac hybrid system.