Preparing ESNII for HORIZON 2020 (Project ESNII+)

ESNII+ is a crosscutting project to develop a broad strategic approach to advanced fission systems in Europe. It is embedded in the European Sustainable Industrial Initiative (ESNII) to prepare structures and deployment strategy and to ensure efficient European coordinated research on reactor safety for the next generation of nuclear installations. It also aims to define strategic orientations for Horizon 2020 with a vision to 2050. In detail, it will coordinate and support the preparatory phase of legal, administrative, financial and governance structures, and ensure the review of the various advanced reactor solutions.

In our group we perform calculations for the reactor prototypes ASTRID, ALLEGRO, and ALFRED using established codes and data libraries. The comparison of the results obtained by various teams will provide useful information about the gaps in the current state-of-the-art methods and tools used for the safety analysis of fast reactor cores. From the results of the core safety analyses, INR experts will identify the experimental and theoretical R&D activities to improve the present design, as well as the existing methods, tools and databases for static and transient analysis, of the ESNII reactor cores. This work also relies on the ADRIANA project of the 7^th EU framework programme that has set up a list of research infrastructures applicable to test and to qualify the related technologies. The conclusions of this work will be used to detail the needs for such experimental facilities and to optimize them, thus reducing the total investment and operating costs. Finally, an R&D roadmap will be drafted.

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