Comparative Assessment of the Transmutation Efficiency of Plutonium and Minor Actinides in Fusion/fission Hybrids and Ads

A preliminary comparative assessment relevant to the transmutation efficiency of plutonium and minor actinides has been performed in the case of ANSALDO’s Energy Amplifier Demonstration Facility based on molten lead-bismuth eutectic cooling, classical MOX-fuel technology and operating at 80 MWth. The neutronic calculations presented in this paper are a result of a state-of-the-art computer code package, EA-MC, developed by C. Rubbia and his group at CERN. Both high-energy particle interactions and low-energy neutron transport are treated with a sophisticated method based on a full Monte Carlo simulation, together with modern nuclear data libraries. Detailed Monte Carlo transport calculations were performed for different types of external neutron sources: D-D and D-T fusion sources and proton induced spallation neutron sources. The fuel core was described on a pinby-pin basis allowing for detailed scans of the main neutronic properties, e.g. neutron flux spectra and power density distributions.