DESC0022821

As the White House strives to decarbonize energy, the Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center has an urgent need to decrease the cost and schedule for new reactor design and construction in support of the Advanced Construction Technology initiative. The current lead time for new reactors is 20-30 years and costs $10-$15 billion1. This must be dramatically reduced to achieve United States nuclear energy leadership. 2.0 Phase I Objective and Approach Digital Engineering, leveraging the best multiphysics simulation and high performance computing, offers the United States a unique opportunity to lead in energy decarbonization, but a paradigm shift in engineering is mandatory: right now, only 1% of engineers use simulation as a tool in their design toolbox. This proposal will make it 100%. An end-to-end solution will be demonstrated that enables the mass adoption of simulation and high performance computing to digitally engineer advanced reactors, facilitating a reduction in the time and cost for their design and construction. 3.0 Phase I Work This proposal will reduce the time requirements of setting up a single simulation from hours to minutes. Setting up and executing new computational physics workflows from a browser and the orchestration system deploying compute jobs to both government systems and commercial cloud systems will be demonstrated. The procedure learning and execution artificial intelligence system will be adapted to ensure Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation codes can be readily set up and run comprehensive workflows — including the generation of code required to integrate packages when needed. In Phase I, the Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation workbench will be integrated into our existing platform for NRIC, starting with a subset of packages: MOOSE, BISON, ARC, Nek5000, SAM, and Marmot, with Fulcrum, VisIt, and ParaView for visualization. 4.0 Commercial Applications and Other Benefits Enabling a broad range of engineers to harness powerful Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation codes will pave the way to accelerating American innovation with massive commercial implications. One example is the power generation market, projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2028.2 In order to achieve the scale-up required to meet the White House’s energy objectives, American engineers must take advantage of the most powerful computational physics software and tools at scale, deployed on high performance computing — which this proposed work will facilitate, and major energy companies are potential customers.