GEANT4 STUDIES OF THE THORIUM FUEL CYCLE

Thorium fuel has been proposed as an alternative to ura-nium fuel in nuclear reactors. New GEANT4 developments allow the Monte Carlo code to be used for the first time in order to simulate the time evolution of the concentration of isotopes present in the Thorium fuel cycle. A full study is performed in order to optimise the production of Uranium-233 starting with “pure ” Thorium fuels, leading to levels of Uranium-233 which ensure the operation of the nuclear reactor in a regime close to criticality. COMPUTATION DETAILS GEANT4 provides an extensive set of hadronic physics models, both for the intra-nuclear cascade region and for modelling of evaporation. There are many different (data based, parametrized and theory-driven) models using dif