Recent progress of R&D on accelerator-driven system in JAEA

Sugawara, Takanori  ; Takei, Hayanori   ; Iwamoto, Hiroki   ; Oizumi, Akito   ; Nishihara, Kenji  ; Tsujimoto, Kazufumi 

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has investigated an accelerator-driven system (ADS) to transmute minor actinides which will be partitioned from the high level waste. There are various inherent issues for the research and development on the ADS. The recent two activities to realize a feasible and reliable ADS concept are introduced in this paper. For the feasibility, the beam window design is one of the most important issues. To mitigate the design condition of the beam window, namely to reduce the proton beam current, the subcritical core concepts with subcriticality adjustment rods were investigated. For the reliability, the double-accelerator concept was proposed to reduce the beam-trip frequency.