Welcome to SANDA !
Solving Challenges in Nuclear Data for the Safety of European Nuclear facilities
(A Nuclear Data Euratom Project in H2020)
The SANDA project objective is to produce accurate and reliable nuclear data tools including data, codes and methodologies that can be used to simulate, analyse, optimize, exploit and evaluate the safety of nuclear energy and non-energy applications.
SANDA is a Research and Innovation Action (RIA) responding to the EURATOM call for Nuclear Fission and Radiation Protection 2018 (NFRP-2018-4).The project started on September 1st, 2019 for a duration of 48 months with 35 participants from 19 countries with a total budget of 4.7 M€ and a EC contribution of 3.5 M€.
Nuclear data and associated tools are a critical element of the nuclear energy industry and research, playing an essential role in the simulation of nuclear systems or devices for nuclear energy and non-energy applications, for the assessment of safety and performance of existing and future reactors and other nuclear facilities, for the innovation of the design of those nuclear facilities and the innovation on radioactive devices and for the use of radioactive materials in non-energy applications, and for the interpretation of measurements in these facilities and systems.
No matter how sophisticated a tool is, no simulation, calculation or interpretation of measurements can be better than the limit imposed by the nuclear data they use. Several parameters, particularly safety parameters of reactors and other nuclear facilities, need to be known with a precision well below 0.1% resulting in nuclear data precisions better than a few percent, sometimes better than 2%. In other cases the precision needed can range from 5 to 20% but the isotope or material to be measured is highly radioactive or very scarce. Despite several decades of nuclear data research these levels of precisions have still not been reached for all the isotopes and reactions required and their determination raise important challenges.
The quality and completeness of the nuclear databases is continuously improving thanks to large collaborative projects and indeed the tools developed in previous projects like ANDES and CHANDA, plus those being developed within SANDA, will bring at reach the target precision for some important isotopes/reactions. The project is built taking into account the High Priority Nuclear Data needs list from OECD/NEA and IAEA to provide the final users with immediately usable data and tools for the cases where this is feasible during the project duration. In addition, the R&D of SANDA will contribute to prepare the path (new detectors, facilities and methods) for future experiments addressing the remaining nuclear data needs in the years to come.
SANDA is expected to contribute, directly and indirectly, to the enhancement of the safety and competitiveness of the European nuclear industry by significantly improving the accuracy of nuclear data, this will also allow to reduce the unnecessary safety and design margins, resulting in more competitive operation of the present nuclear installations without sacrificing safety standards, and in more competitive designs of new reactors, nuclear facilities or their components. This enhancement of safety and competitiveness applies not only to reactor operation and construction but also to the waste management, storage, reprocessing or disposal, and also in some sense to the decommissioning of nuclear facilities.
More information about the SANDA project and actions can be found at the Documents for Partners, in the presentations of the kick-off meeting, and the summary of meetings at the SANDA Indico web page. Please also check the Latest news and the Library of documents produced by the project.
This Web is continuously updated and still under construction, so it can change frequently.