The Status of the ALFRED Project

The Lead cooled Fast Reactor (LFR) has been selected by the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) as one of the most promising nuclear technologies able to meet the GIF goals and playing an increasingly important role in the international context. The ALFRED (the Advanced Lead-cooled Fast Reactor European Demonstrator) project aims to bridge the gap between the research and development effort and the commercial application. The ALFRED project is internationally supported by FALCON (Fostering ALFRED CONstruction), a consortium under the leadership of Ansaldo Nucleare with ENEA (IT) and ICN (RO) which is presently pursuing the design review and optimization of the reactor system arrangement, an integration of the safety demonstration plan within the R&D roadmap as well as the pre-licensing approach. In addition to the three full members, FALCON gathers many European organizations willing to contribute to ALFRED development not only in its role of LFR technology demonstrator but also as a prototype of a viable competitive LFR commercial unit in the Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) segment, by 2035-2040. The FALCON consortium recently completed a design review of ALFRED (based on the design developed and defined in the frame of the EC FP7 LEADER project) and, on the basis of the review, agreed to proceed to an optimized configuration able to solve all the specific issues of the previous configuration introducing innovative aspects not only related to improvements but also envisaged to increase the economic attractiveness for a potential deployment of ALFRED as a first Small Modular Fast Reactor (SMFR). In parallel to such important developments the FALCON consortium is already developing a licensing strategy able to cope with the shortage of irradiation facilities (worldwide but especially European) through a staged approach providing the necessary qualification steps for this new technology, and pursuing the activities associated with the pre-licensing phase. The paper presents the main design developments, the new primary system arrangement and the strategy in terms of both R&D efforts as well as the envisaged licensing approach.

@Proceedings{AFCMTGMPTCD21,
  editor       = {Alemberti, A. and Frignani, M. and Caramello, M. and Merli, F. and Tarantino, M. and Grasso, G. and Moreau, V. and Profir, M. and Turcu, I. and Constantin, M. and Diaconu, D.},
  title        = {The Status of the ALFRED Project},
  series       = {IAEA International Conference on Fast Reactors and Related Fuel Cycles – Fast Reactors ‘21},
  month        = {may},
  year         = {2021},
  organization = {IAEA},
  address      = {Beijing},
  keywords     = {ALFRED, LFR, reactor design, demonstrator, FALCON},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2021/AFCMTGMPTCD21},
}