Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
At MIT, Naranjo De Candido is working on improving access to nuclear energy by scaling down reactor size and making microreactors mobile enough to travel to places where they are needed. She said, “The idea with a microreactor is that when the fuel is exhausted, you replace the entire microreactor onsite with a freshly fueled unit and take the old one back to a central facility where it’s going to be refueled.” One of the early use cases for such microreactors has been to supply power to remote mining sites that require it twenty-four hours a day.
Modular reactors generate less than three hundred megawatts. The components can be manufactured and installed at scale. These reactors generate industrial heat as well as electricity. Naranjo De Candido said, “You can locate them close to industrial facilities and use the heat directly to power ammonia or hydrogen production or water desalinization for example.”
As more of these modular reactors are installed, the nuclear industry is expected to expand to include enterprises that choose to build them and then hand off installation and operations to other companies. Traditional nuclear power reactors usually have a full staff on site. But SMRs cannot afford to staff in big numbers so talent needs to be optimized and staff shared among many reactors. Naranjo De Candido said, “Many of these companies are very interested in knowing exactly how many people and how much money to allocate, and how to organize resources to serve more than one reactor at the same time,”
Naranjo De Candido is working on complex software that factors in a large range of variables including raw material costs and worker training, reactor size, megawatt output and more. It leans on historical data to predict what resources newer plants might need. The program also alerts operators about tradeoffs they might need to accept. She said, “if you reduce people below the typical level assigned, how does that impact the reliability of the plant, that is, the number of hours that it is able to operate without malfunctions and failures?”
Managing and operating a nuclear reactor is particularly complex because safety standards limit how much time workers can work in radioactive areas and how safe zones need to be handled.
Naranjo De Candido said, “There’s a shortage of [qualified talent] in the industry so this is not just about reducing costs but also about making it possible to have plants out there.” Different types of talent are required, from professionals who specialized in electronic controls to mechanical components. Her model considers the need for such specialized skillsets as well as making room for cross-training talent in multiple fields as needed.
Naranjo De Candido’s optimization software will be open-source, available for all to use. She said, “We want this to be a common ground for utilities and vendors and other players to be able to communicate better.” This will accelerate the operation of nuclear energy plants at scale.