Book Description

The Los Alamos Accelerator Transmutation of Nuclear Waste (ATW) concept consists of four principal systems: accelerator, neutron spallation target, blanket, and chemical separator. The device is designed to transmute actinides and fission products carried in heavy water slurries or aqueous solutions. The design goals of the device are to transmute the actinide and fission product waste from at least two 1000 MW{sub e} LWR{sub s}, and to produce enough electricity to power the accelerator with some excess to sell to local power utilities. This means our goal is to transmute 80 kg of technetium and iodine, and 600 kg of actinide per year. This device is the latest in a series of ATW systems that have been studied by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Each device has been the object of many radiation physics calculations in order to arrive at some local optimum in terms of transmutation rates and achievable power production. Our basic calculational tool is the one-dimensional transport code ONEDANT. It is important to know, however, how close our results are to those obtainable from a real device. This requires that two- and three-dimensional calculations be made in order to obtain a calculational benchmark. For the two- and three-dimensional calculations we use the codes TWODANT and MCNP, respectively. This paper presents the results of one set of comparisons for the ATW device discussed above.