The MYRRHA Project in Belgium: Status after the Two First Years of Basic Engineering Work

The MYRRHA project started in 1998 by SCK•CEN. MYRRHA is a Material Testing Reactor (MTR), based on the Accelerator Driven System (ADS) concept, for material and fuel research, for studying the feasibility of transmutation of Minor Actinides and Long-Lived Fission Products arising from radioactive waste reprocessing and finally for demonstrating at a reasonable power scale the principle of the ADS. The MYRRHA design has progressed through various framework programmes of the European Commission in the context of Partitioning and Transmutation. The design has now entered into the Front End Engineering Phase (FEED) covering the period 2012-2015. The engineering company, which will handle this phase, has been selected and the works have begun in the late 2013. In the meantime we have made some progress in the licensing process. In this paper, we present the most recent developments of the MYRRHA design and our current experience with the Belgian safety authority FANC (Federal Agency for Nuclear Control).