Title: Modeling Tools and Challenges Related to TerraPower’s Advanced Reactor Technologies
Abstract: TerraPower is currently leading efforts to design, license, and construct two separate advanced reactor systems: (1) the Natrium™ sodium-cooled fast reactor and (2) the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment. These two systems, owing to their fundamental differences from existing commercial reactors, pose unique challenges for modeling and simulation. After briefly overviewing the important aspects of each design, this talk will discuss some of these unique modeling challenges and provide an overview of the tools that TerraPower has developed to address them.
Bio: Chris is a nuclear methods engineer at TerraPower working in support of the design and licensing of the Natrium sodium fast reactor. In this role, he develops computational methods, builds reactor models, and evaluates reactor benchmark suites that will be used to support the verification and validation cases of the various neutronics tools in use at TerraPower. He received his BS from NPRE in 2015 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Prior to joining TerraPower, he worked in the Safety Analysis Section at Argonne National Laboratory as part of the team developing the SAS4A/SASSYS-1 transient analysis code.
