CANDIDE: Coordination Action on Nuclear Data for Industry Development in Europe

CANDIDE is the acronym for "Coordination Action on Nuclear Data for Industry Development in Europe. The purpose of this two-years (January 2007 to December 2008) EC FP6 project is:

• To review the current modes of nuclear data production
• To assess the present status of our knowledge, estimate what accuracy can be reached with state-of-the-art numerical simulation techniques
• Identify the needs for improved nuclear data, and suggest appropriate actions to be taken to meet those needs

Project summary

A Co-ordinated Action is proposed with the ambition to establish a durable network on nuclear data efforts that are important in the context of minimising the high-level waste stream of nuclear energy. This implies optimal incineration of all actinides that nowadays constitute spent nuclear fuel, in critical and sub-critical reactors. As a consequence, the scope of the proposed CA encompasses transmutation in critical reactors (Gen-IV type concepts) as well as sub-critical systems (ADS).

The purpose is to identify the needs for improved nuclear data, assess the present status of knowledge, and to estimate what accuracy can be reached with state-of-the-art techniques. The final result of the CA will be a report describing the state-of-the-art and giving recommendations to the EU outlining how nuclear data research should be organised in FP7 and beyond.

The project is focussed on nuclear data issues that are critical to the assessment of the safety and effectiveness of the various proposed waste management strategies, by considering primarily the fuels and structural parts of the cores. To achieve this goal, the proposed CA brings together competence from the entire spectrum of stakeholders ranging from industry to research institutes and academic research. The basic structure of the project is top-down, i.e., the needs for improved data are identified primarily by the industry, and these needs are used as a starting point for further actions.

The CA furthermore includes promotion of training and integration by the development of a European course for young professionals on nuclear data, as well as workshops for integrating nuclear data research communities hitherto not being well-integrated partners of the regular, well-established nuclear data organs. This concerns primarily the relatively new nuclear data community in ADS research and the nuclear data research in the new member and candidate states.

Partners

The CANDIDE partnership panel covers the entire chain from industry to experiments, involving:

• Reactor construction or manufacturing organizations (AREVA, France; BNFL group, UK; Skoda corporation, Czech Republic)
• Power producers (TVO, Finland and EdF, France), representing light water reactor technology.
• Fuel manufacturing is represented by Nexia/BNFL and AREVA, while reprocessing is represented by Nexia/BNFL.
• Validation and evaluation teams are represented by CEA, Cadarache; CEA Bruyères-le-Châtel (France) and NRG Petten, The Nederlands)
• ITN (Portugal) contributes expertise in nuclear data related to spallation targets.
• On the experimental side, IRMM Geel is the dedicated EU lab for reactor-relevant nuclear data (0-20 MeV), while TSL Uppsala is the primary European facility for neutrons above 20 MeV (up to 200 MeV), which will cover important input for ADS neutronics.
• SCK•CEN (Belgium) and CIEMAT (Spain) are representing the Designers of future ADS-related facilities. The reliability of various design parameters depends heavily on the accuracy of nuclear data used mainly in the reactor physics design calculations.

Website: http://candide.nri.cz/

Malambu Mbala Edouard