Nuclear Energy Research Moves Toward Greater Reliance on Computer Simulation
Argonne’s Nuclear Energy Research Moves Toward Greater Reliance on Computer Simulation
Innovations Report
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory is increasingly relying on computer simulation and modeling to carry out nuclear energy research. “The traditional approach to developing nuclear energy technologies is to do a bunch of experiments to demonstrate a process or reaction,” notes Argonne’s program manager for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Mark Peters. “What Argonne is doing is creating a set of integrated models that demonstrate and validate new technologies, using a smaller number of experiments.” Argonne’s nuclear simulation project leader Andrew Siegel adds that virtual experimentation can substantially lower facilities’ costs by improving the identification and targeting of the physical experiments underlying their design. He says Argonne computational researchers are developing SHARP (Simulation-based High-efficiency Reactor Prototyping) software components that digitally emulate physical processes that transpire within a reactor core. The SHARP toolkit has been devised to exploit the lab’s Advanced Leadership Computing Facility featuring IBM’s Blue Gene/P computer, which runs at a sustained rate of 1 petaflop per second. SHARP could ultimately supplant computer codes that are used to carry out safety assessments of aging nuclear reactors, and Siegel says simulation tools such as SHARP could potentially save millions of dollars in reactor design development and assembly.
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