New Build

With every renaissance comes inspiration, the nuclear energy industry being no exception. We look to see what the bright young things of tomorrow are developing and how their research could propel the nuclear power industry into the forefront of low carbon energy programmes in the US and the UK.

By Peter Taberner

In the US, universities were boosted after the announcement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu that 51 university led projects would receive $39m in grants to rubberstamp the US Department of Energy’s commitment to the advancement of nuclear energy research.

One such grant was awarded to Colorado State University for $1,098,250 that will be spent on the modelling and quantification of nuclear fuel performance.

Donald Estep, the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Mathematics and Statistics at Colorado, takes up the story. “The project is to carry out fundamental research on mathematical and statistical tools to model nuclear fuel behaviour. The practical goal is to accelerate the design and testing of new fuels that will be better for operations leading to greater efficiency and safety."

Estep says that designing new fuels using only experimental testing is time consuming and expensive. “Mathematical modelling of fuel performance has a great promise to significantly speed up the process by reducing the amount of physical testing required,” he says.

Future vision

His vision for the future is likely to include growth in the interdisciplinary collaborations between mathematics and statistics, and nuclear energy to be tied to the use of computational mathematical modelling and statistics to investigate and predict behaviour of fuels and reactors.

Estep believes that it could be possible to create jobs if there is evolution in the areas of reactor and fuel design; if the current scientific and theoretical models are converted into new kinds of plants that are more efficient and safer.

Moving east the University of Michigan also stands to gain from the energy department’s grant plan, which is set to be invested in long term performance of apatite waste forms. The university receives grants from many donors with up to eight on-going projects on some occasions often the norm.

Fuel fidelity and job creation

One of the most prominent research projects involves the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters or CASL, that is home to six graduate programmes. The research includes the development of a fuel fidelity model. The researchers there have a reactor in a virtual form to carry out further studies on what is viewed as being different to a gas reactor. The university has three industrial partners for the project including the TVA.

Bill Martin, the Professor and Chair of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department, does not believe that the CASL project has the potential to make a huge indent on the jobs market just yet, but there are areas where there is hope.

“There have been up to 28 applications to the NRC for new plants in the US so construction is an obvious growth area, and the demographics are good for students as the workers who built plants in the sixties and seventies are now nearing retirement.”

Will the UK lead the nuclear renaissance?

Across the Atlantic, UK universities are also developing their own advances in research mirroring their US counterparts. At one of the oldest and hallowed institutions, the University of Cambridge’s nuclear energy centre has five major areas of research that include Thorium fuelled reactors and accelerator driven sub-critical reactors, pen cycle thorium reactors, energy networks proliferation and highly active nuclear waste in support of the geological disposal facility.

“Our view is that the UK will be a forefront of the nuclear renaissance when Fukushima’s lessons are absorbed. There is a big international opportunity for the UK, but it needs to invest in skills and in new developments. The types of reactors that will be built in the UK are not at the end of their developments and we need to spend research and development funds on LWR enhancement and exploitation,” explains Tony Roulstone, lecturer and course director.

Roulstone believes that job market will prosper in two of three years, as nuclear reactors get built new and skilled operators and engineers will be required.

The Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester is concentrating on two or three major research projects including all aspects of the fuel cycle, and technologies into the recycling and waste disposal of environmental radiation.

The institute is part of the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre that sprouted from the previous Labour government’s commitment to a low carbon industrial strategy.

Uniting industry and academia

Following the release of tenders to develop the centre, the universities of Manchester and Sheffield won the rights to lead the project, and have huge input from the private sector with ‘tier one’ partners including Areva, Rolls Royce, Tata Steel and Sheffield Forgemasters.

“Industry plays a significant part of how we decide our curriculum and the programmes that we put forward has to be accepted by industry figures with modifications sometimes put forward to support the industry,” explains Dr John Roberts, nuclear fellow at the institute.

“In terms of job creation general capacity is the industry’s growth area as the government is committed to plant construction and nuclear power, we don’t want to be another Germany.”