Reactor simulation takes the heat
Posted August 13, 2007
Paul Fischer is plugging in something that one day could help millions of others tap into safe, clean nuclear energy.
Fischer, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, is creating computer codes that will help simulate the next generation of nuclear reactors.
What Fischer and his fellow researchers simulate is “just one small part of the entire reactor,” he says. “Ultimately, designers want to be able to simulate every part.” To do that, however, designers must make many assumptions.
Fischer wants to eliminate some of those assumptions. It’s important, because most simulations are based on experimental data dating back to nuclear power’s heyday 30 years ago.
Most of the simulation codes also weren’t designed for parallel computing, which splits up a task among multiple processors to reach an answer more quickly.
Concerns about global climate change and fossil fuel supplies have led to greater interest in a new kind of nuclear power plant. They’re expected to be safer, to produce more power, and to produce as much as 100 times less waste than today’s reactors.
What’s more, proposed “fast” reactors will use waste recycled from today’s nuclear plants. They’ll economically produce power and consume waste from current-generation reactors, thus reducing the burden on repositories where waste would be held deep underground. These recycling reactors rely on different cooling mechanisms than current-generation reactors.
That’s where Fischer comes in. With a grant of 1 million processor hours from DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, he and his fellow researchers are developing computer simulations of heat transfer in coolant flowing around tightly packed nuclear fuel rods.
If that isn’t difficult enough, the proposed design throws in a few added twists – literally.