Electron accelerator driven system for transmutation studies

An accelerator driven system has been studied by irradiation with 20 MeV electrons. Slow, intermediate and fast neutrons were measured by activation and Solid State Track Detectors. The total neutrons emitted from the target were 0.005 per electron, equally divided to slow and intermediate-fast energy regions. An agreement was presented between experimental results and simulations using the GEANT 4 code. The transmutation efficiency of 238U has been estimated as1.04 (± 0.09) × 10−7 per U-gram. Furthermore, the neutron total cross section of natPb was estimated 9.4 ± 1.8 b for fast neutrons and 6.0 ± 0.7 b for slow-intermediate neutrons.