Preliminary safety analysis of the TRANSMUTEX sub-critical reactor using the GeN-Foam multi-physics solver

This work presents a preliminary safety analysis of the accelerator-driven system under development at TRANSMUTEX. It is a sub-critical lead-cooled fast reactor with a nominal power of 300 MWth having the following features: (1) an inert-matrix fuel; (2) a k(off) = 0.974; (3) a heavy metal spallation target; and (4) a 4 MW proton accelerator. The safety analyses are based on the GeN-Foam multi-physics code, whose point-kinetics sub-solver has been extended for the analysis of sub-critical reactor configurations. In the paper, we first present the extension of the code and its verification against analytical results. Then, we present the results of our preliminary safety analysis, including in particular the simulation of various unprotected (double-fault) accidental transients.