Since the 2000s, several activities have been devoted in Europe to the development of innovative heavy liquid metal Lead-cooled Fast nuclear Reactors (LFRs) to enhance energy production, sustainability, safety and cost-effectiveness.
To address licensing challenges, build operational experience, and shorten the time-to-market for attracting investments in small and medium modular LFRs, European research bodies and industries have collaborated on various Euratom projects like ANSELMUS, INNUMAT, HARMONISE, PASCAL, and PUMMA.
Progressing on these efforts, the LESTO project aims to improve the LFR Technology Readiness and demonstrate that this technology can meet stringent safety standards, providing data and tools to accelerate the licensing process, and can be integrated in the european network together with renewable sources.
To accomplish these goals, activities will be devoted to fill critical technological gaps through:
-comprehensive studies, and relate safety considerations, on coupling LFR systems with various balance of plant configurations for both modern renewable-heavy energy grids and non-electric uses like hydrogen production and industrial heat
-analyis of the activation of non-fuel components to improve waste management and future decommissioning processes
-testing and simulation of innovative passive systems for post-accident decay heat removal to prevent and mitigate accidents
-testing of the reliability of material, components and systems in the challenging environment of heavy liquid metal coolants; this includes material testing against corrosion, erosion and fretting phenomena and the validation of large-scale oxygen sensors, oxygen control and coolant purification systems
-large pool scale experiments, investigating liquid metal thermal-hydraulic in both normal and off-normal conditions, including high-pressure steam generator tube rupture transients
-studying fission product retention during core degradation and creating new predictive models for fission product transport
By consolidating past and conducting first-of-a-kind experiments in state-of-the-art European facilities, LESTO aims to build a comprehensive database to help institutions and safety authorities qualify analytical codes, ultimately sharing critical knowledge from the laboratory to real-world applications and providing stakeholders with the practical tools needed to build future commercial reactors.
