These proceedings of the Second Workshop on Utilisation and Reliability of High Power Proton Accelerators placed special emphasis on accelerator-driven system (ADS) concepts comprising a sub-critical reactor coupled with a high power accelerator.

This publication contains the technical papers presented at a NEA workshop, held in the Republic of Korea in May 2004, to consider research into the use of accelerator-driven systems (ADS) in radioactive waste management, as well as summaries of the working group discussions. Topics discussed include: accelerator reliability; target, window and coolant technology; sub-critical system design and ADS simulations; safety and control of ADS; ADS experiments and test facilities.

The Thorium Energy Conference (ThEC13) gathered some of the world’s leading experts on thorium technologies to review the possibility of destroying nuclear waste in the short term, and replacing the uranium fuel cycle in nuclear systems with the thorium fuel cycle in the long term. The latter would provide abundant, reliable and safe energy with no CO2 production, no air pollution, and minimal waste production. The participants, representatives of 30 countries, included Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Prize Laureate in physics and inventor of the Energy Amplifier; Jack Steinberger, Nobel Prize Laureate in physics; Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN; Pascal Couchepin, former President of the Swiss Confederation; and Claude Haegi, President of the FEDRE, to name just a few. The ThEC13 proceedings are a source of reference on the use of thorium for energy generation. They offer detailed technical reviews of the status of thorium energy technologies, from basic R&D to industrial developments. They also describe how thorium can be used in critical reactors and in subcritical accelerator-driven systems (ADS), answering the important questions: – Why is thorium so attractive and what is the role of innovation, in particular in the nuclear energy domain? – What are the national and international R&D programs on thorium technologies and how are they progressing? ThEC13 was organized jointly by the international Thorium Energy Committee (iThEC), an association based in Geneva, and the International Thorium Energy Organisation (IThEO). It was held in the Globe of Science and Innovation at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland, in October 2013.