Study on Neutronics Design of an Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactor

Thorium fueled Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactors have been proposed as a more comprehensive alternative to conventional nuclear reactors for both energy production and for burning radioactive waste. Several new classes have been added by the authors to the GEANT4 simulation code, an extension which allows the state-of-the-art code to be used for the first time for nuclear reactor criticality calculations. In this paper we investigate the impact of the subcriticality and injected proton beam energy on the ADSR performance for novel ADSR configurations involving multiple accelerator drivers and associated neutron spallation targets within the reactor core.