Background
In the global effort to bring sustainable energy sources, advanced fuel cycles including Partitioning and Transmutation (P&T) are widely investigated for the future of nuclear energy. The ongoing research shows the potential benefits of P&T contributing to simplifying the management of present and future radioactive waste, including:
• The large reduction of long term radioactivity, radiotoxicity and fissile materials inventories that can contribute to improving the public acceptance of the unavoidable geological repositories, and
• The minimization of short and medium-term heat sources that can allow a reduction in the volume required by the high-level wastes in repositories, increasing their effective capacity and reducing their number.
In this sense, P&T is expected to contribute both to the sustainability of nuclear energy in those countries that pursue this source of energy and to easy the final repository requirements of countries using nuclear energy at present.
Objective
The strategic objective of research in this area is to work towards a European Transmutation Demonstration (ETD) in a step-wise manner. The aim of this 4-year FP6 project EUROTRANS (total budget of 42.3 M€, including 23 M€ of EC contribution) is to carry out a first advanced design of an approximately 50 to 100 MWth eXperimental facility (realisation in a short-term, say about 10 years) demonstrating the technical feasibility of Transmutation in an Accelerator Driven System (XT-ADS), as well as to accomplish a generic conceptual design (several 100 MWth) of a modular European Facility for Industrial Transmutation (EFIT) (realisation in the long-term). Both designs bear the same fundamental system characteristics in order to allow scalability between XT-ADS and EFIT.
Having started its mission in the area of reactor engineering focussing on the academic world, ENEN is now extending its activities to other areas such as waste management, radiation protection, and innovative concepts, expanding from the academic world (education) to the industrial and regulatory worlds (training).
Participants
EUROTRANS has proposed to gather all R&D activities performed by the 17 participating Universities under the umbrella of the Legal Entity European Nuclear Education Network (ENEN) Association. The Universities contributing to EUROTRANS and represented by ENEN are:
• Party P13.1:  AGH-University of Science and Technology (AGH-UST, Krakow, Poland)
• Party P13.2: Atominstitut der Oesterreichischen Universitaeten (ATI, Vienna, Austria)
• Party P13.3:  Consortium Interuniversitario per la Ricerca Technologica Nucleare (CIRTEN, Pisa, Italy)
• Party P13.4: J. W. Goethe Universität (IAP-FU, Frankfurt, Germany)
• Party P13.5: ETS Institute QuĂc de Sarriá (IQS, Barcelona, Spain)
• Party P13.6: Royal Technical Institute Stockholm (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden) – since April 2006
• Party P13.7: Ruhr Universität Bochum (RUB-LEE, Bochum, Germany)
• Party P13.8:  Delft University of Technology (DUT, Delft, The Netherlands)
• Party P13.9:  Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
• Party P13.10: Université de Liège (ULG, Liege, Belgium)
• Party P13.11: Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED, Madrid, Spain)
• Party P13.12: Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM, Madrid, Spain)
• Party P13.13: Deparamanto de Ingenieria Quimica y Nuclear Universidad Politechnica Valencia (UPV, Valencia, Spain)
• Party P13.14: University of Santiago de Compostela (USDC Santiago, Spain)
• Party P13.15: Universidad de Sevilla (USE, Sevilla, Spain)
• Party P13.16: Uppsala Universitet (UU, Uppsala, Sweden)
• Party P13.17: Universität Hannover (ZSR Hannover, Germany)
All participants of IP EUROTRANS
ENEN’s Role
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| Clearly, ENEN is providing the link between the students in the Universities and the scientists working at the participating institutes of EUROTRANS. ENEN is connecting the students already during their stay at the universities with ongoing research work and their potential future employers, i.e. the industry, the national research centres, and the JRCs. |
| Organised and focused by ENEN and the participating Universities, a considerable part of the scientific work of EUROTRANS is performed by young students and researchers in the Universities. ENEN will co-ordinate the University activities including the collection and pooling of the annual cost statements. |
| In addition, special educational efforts are performed by ENEN and the EUROTRANS partners. Of special importance are lectures at universities, workshops, short courses, and summer schools dedicated to transmutation. Training and education (E&T) of students on the job, e.g. via a diploma thesis and/or a PhD thesis, is an important mission of EUROTRANS, as these young students and researchers shall gradually be recruited as post-doctoral students and junior staff. |
| The interdisciplinary character of EUROTRANS research (e.g. reactor physics, materials science, radiochemistry, thermal-hydraulics, instrumentation, engineering design) makes it particularly well adapted for the training of PhD students and researchers. |
| ENEN is in charge of the organisation of 10 Internal Training Courses(ITC) in close collaboration with the Project Office and takes care of the reporting about these courses. The Knowledge Management system is used to support the courses, from announcements to storage and dissemination of the training course results. This includes programme, abstracts, papers, presentations and reports. Ample time will be left for open debates and exchange of scientific experiences amongst teachers and students. These courses are of utmost importance for the knowledge transfer between experienced scientists and educated young scientists. |
>>Juan Antonio Rubio – Paul Govaerts EUROTRANS ENEN Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertations
>Â News of 29 April 2010
JUAN ANTONIO RUBIO – PAUL GOVAERTS EUROTRANS ENEN PRIZE FOR THE BEST DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS
Released on Thursday 29 April 2010
>Â News of 10 November 2010
JUAN ANTONIO RUBIO – PAUL GOVAERTS EUROTRANS ENEN PRIZE FOR THE BEST DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS
Released on Wednesday 10 November 2010
During the Eurosafe 2010, the award ceremony for the “Juan Antonio Rubio – Paul Govaerts EUROTRANS ENEN Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation” was organised in Cologne, Germany, 9 November 2010.
The laureates are:
–Â Wim HAECK, Belgium, for his dissertation “An Optimum Approach to Monte Carlo Burn-Up”;
–Â Joris VAN DEN BOSCH, Belgium, for his dissertation “ADS Candidate Materials Compatibility with Liquid Metal in a Neutron Irradiation Environment”;
–Â Carlos GUERRERO, Spain, for his dissertation “Measurements of the 237NP and 240PU Neutron Capture Cross Sections at the CERN N_TOF Facility”;
–Â Chuan ZHANG, China, for his dissertation “Linac Design for Intense Hadron Beams”; and
–Â Laure MARTINELLI, France, for her dissertation “Specialite Chimie Physique et Chimie Analyteque”.
