Education and Training Series #28: European Sodium Fast Reactor: An Introduction
Part of a webinar series hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group since 2016.
Who should attend?
Policymakers, industry professionals, regulators, researchers, students, the general public.
About the "GIF Education and Training" Webinars
These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.
These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG).
About this Webinar
This webinar presents a brief history of the conceptual development of a large-power (3600 MWth) European Sodium Fast Reactor (ESFR), discusses the status of the current R&D activities on Generation-IV ESFR safety enhancements of the Horison-2020 ESFR-SMART project, and provides an overview of new safety measures proposed for improvement of the three safety functions: reactivity control, heat removal and radioactivity containment. Also, experimental programs currently on-going in Europe in support of the ESFR R&D are briefly introduced. A summary of the activities to be performed during the next phase of the project concludes the webinar.
Presentation made during the webinar
Meet the presenter
Dr. Konstantin Mikityuk has been involved in research of safety-related aspects of various nuclear reactors with a fast neutron spectrum since he earned his doctorate from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1992: first at the Russian Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute,” and then at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). His current interests are safety analysis of sodium-cooled fast reactor, in particular neutronics and thermal-hydraulic aspects of sodium boiling. Dr. Mikityuk is a Group leader at PSI, Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lecturer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ). He is also the coordinator of the Horison-2020 ESFR-SMART project.