Final MEGAPIE Technical Review Meeting
October 23rd - 24th 2014
Bregenz, Austria
After almost 15 years the MegaWatt Pilot Experiment, MEGAPIE, has reached its final phase – the Post Irradiation Examination (PIE) of the targets’ structural materials and of the Lead-Bismuth-Eutectic (LBE). In 1999 Günter Bauer (PSI), Massimo Salvatores (CEA) and Gert Heusener (KIT) launched the MEGAPIE initiative as a milestone experiment for Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) to demonstrate the feasibility to design, build, license, operate, dismantle and dispose a liquid Lead Bismuth Eutectic cooled spallation target (Power: 1 MegaWatt). The MEGAPIE Consortium was structured and consists of the following international partners: CEA (France), CNRS (France), DoE (USA), ENEA (Italy), EU, J-PARC (Japan), KIT (Germany), KAERI (Rep. of Korea) , LANL (USA), PSI (Switzerland) and SCK·CEN (Belgium).
In total the project has undergone ten main phases, from the first idea and design of the spallation target and ancillary systems through the target construction at ATEA and the integral test of the target system behavior over the licensing to its operation in the spallation neutron source SINQ at PSI with the MegaWatt proton beam provided by the High Power Accelerator (HIPA) to MEGAPIE system dismantling and disposal and finally the Post Irradiation Examinations (PIE).
The final stage of MEGAPIE, the PIE, is currently carried out in Hot Laboratories in Belgium, France, Japan, Switzerland and the USA and provides indispensable information on structural materials and LBE behavior under irradiation for future spallation targets (for Accelerator Driven Systems or more generally Neutron Sources). The final MEGAPIE Technical Review Meeting (TRM) will be the last in a series of 11 meetings which were held on a regular basis during the project. In contrast to other TRMs the current meeting will be open to all interested researchers from the ADS, Material Science and Target Community and – of course – to all contributors to the MEGAPIE project. In this TRM the main achievements of the MEGAPIE project in the past 15 years will be reviewed and – in a combined session with IWSMT – the latest Post Irradiation Examination (PIE) results will be presented for the first time. Moreover, one session will be devoted to current ADS projects.
The final MEGAPIE TRM will be held in Bregenz, Austria, subsequent to the 12th International Workshop on Spallation Material Technology (IWSMT-12), from October 23 – 24, 2014.
