Chalmers nuclear engineering gets SEK 34M for research

Two research leaders at Chalmers receive a total of SEK 34M from the Swedish Research Council for nuclear engineering research in a Swedish-French collaboration agreement. The grants cover a period of five years and contain a total of seven PhD positions.

Professors Imre Pázsit and Christophe Demazière, each being the recipient of one of the three multi-project grants which the Swedish Research Council awarded this spring, are both from the Division of Nuclear Engineering,  Department of Applied Physics. They will now be participating in the French program of constructing a new research reactor as well as an industrial prototype fast reactor in Provence, and they hence will coordinate the Swedish contribution to the collaboration. The PhD students are going to spend more than half of their graduate studies in France.

Christophe Demazière is awarded SEK 15,1 million for the project ”Deterministic modelling of the Jules Horowitz Reactor (Demo-JHR)”. The multi-project grant comprises three PhD projects. Two of the PhD projects will be performed in Chalmers and one at KTH, Stockholm. These PhD projects concern the research reactor Jules Horowitz, which is currently being built and will be completed in a couple of years time. The main purpose of the Jules Horowitz reactor is to investigate radiation damage of materials and aging in the currently operating nuclear power plants. The reactors which are in use today, were originally designed for a lifetime of 40 years, whereas now many countries consider to extend the lifetime to 60 or even 80 years. The new research reactor is going to provide extreme levels of radiation as well as high temperature and pressure, in order that the researchers can study their effect on the properties of materials.

Imre Pázsit is awarded SEK 18,8 million for the project ”Core physics, diagnostics and instrumentation for the enhanced safety of the sodium cooled fast reactor Astrid”. The multi-project grant contains four PhD projects, all of them relating to safety. Two of the PhD students will have Chalmers as their base, and one each will be in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Uppsala University. Astrid, whose construction has not yet started, is going to be an industrial prototype of a sodium cooled fast reactor – the very first Generation IV reactor worldwide. The reactor is planned to be completed by 2022. It will produce its own fuel with the so-called transmutation technique, while at the same time also decreasing the total volume and the storage time of long lived radioactive waste significantly.

The collaboration agreement between the Swedish Research Council and the French Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives is part of a larger research agreement between Sweden and France, which was signed in 2010. The collaboration on nuclear engineering is an in-kind contribution from Sweden to reciprocate the French participation in the material research facility ESS in Lund.