The 2011 Mid-term progress meeting of the Accelerator Driven Sub-critical System (ADS) Project was held at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) from August 27 to 29, 2011. Present at the meeting were over 70 experts from the CAS institutes concerned.

At the meeting, scientists from different sub-systems reported respectively on their research progress. Prof. CHAI Zhifang, CAS Academician from the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), delivered a report entitled Radiation Chemistry in ADS, which introduced the current status of the radiation chemistry in China and its close relations with ADS project. Then, participants from IHEP and IMP had extensive discussions over the current difficulties in the project, facilities construction and future research plans.

ADS has been proposed as a tool generating electric power and as a tool producing transmutation of nuclear waste as well, which is an important direction of development for the future energy of advanced neutron spallation. The ADS reactor will be nuclear fission type that produces fission without achieving criticality. Instead of a sustaining chain reaction, a subcritical reactor uses additional neutrons from an outside source. The neutron source can be a nuclear fusion machine or a particle accelerator producing neutrons by spallation. Such a device with a reactor coupled to an accelerator is called accelerator-driven system, namely ADS.

As one of the strategic priority research projects under the newly-launched CAS Innovation 2020 program, the ADS Project reflected CAS’s determination to push forward the scientific innovation in the whole country.