Brasimone restoration started!

In order to develop our Lead-cooled Fast Reactors the experimental activities are of crucial importance: the ENEA-Brasimone centre is where we are working on all the non-nuclear aspects of our design.

LFR greatly benefits of lead intrinsic thermal-hydraulic behaviour, long-studied by ENEA via multiple experimental facilities.
newcleo and ENEA are collaborating on many aspects thanks to the framework agreement signed earlier this year. Our experimental campaigns will be complementary to ENEA’s and will greatly advance our project, giving a strong grounding to the safety aspects of our design and providing a matchless backbone to sustain our aggressive pace.

As you can see in our drone shots, the centre is surrounded by nature: 400 hectares, just 100 devoted to the infrastructures.

Brasimone’s main infrastructures and halls were built in the 1970s and the buildings allocated to newcleo – office, Main Hall, electricity buildings and chemistry lab – need a deep restoration and some modifications to make room for our activities.

While working to build our own equipment, we’ll exploit available ENEA test facilities for our preliminary experimental campaigns. We are working now on a test section for our steam generator to be tested in the NACIE-UP facility, and we’ll later use HELENA facility.

In July we started – and we have now completed – the removal of large steel air conducts from our halls, progressively blowtorch cut and taken outside with a forklift.

Restoration started in our office buildings too. When ready, these will host up to 25/30 colleagues (our team on site is currently hosted at ENEA offices).

In our 22 metres tall Main Hall we restored and commissioned the 60t overhead crane on 27 July. Here we’ll have our loop, a non-nuclear separate effect test facility, and the precursor, a non-nuclear pool-type integral test facility reproducing our LFR-AS-30 at a reduced scale.

The precursor will use electrical heaters to simulate the nuclear fuel. The 10MW thermal resistors impose an upgrade of the electrical substation of the ENEA-Brasimone centre: to that end we started the procurement of an additional 16 MW transformer. This activity is of primary importance for the obvious necessity of an adequate power input for our facilities.

We’ll keep you updated on the progress of these activities in the coming months!

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