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Real Life Nuclear Engineers |
First hand stories of young nuclear engineers getting into the field. |
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We asked some nuclear engineers to write about their experiences so far in their lives. Here’s what we got.
![Janelle Janelle](/whatisnuclear/website/raw/master/img/jjsp.jpg)
When developing core designs, I figured out how to arrange the approximately 250 fuel assemblies in the core in the best possible configuration so as to maintain safety under all possible operating conditions and unexpected accident conditions. The core design incorporates partially-used fuel from previous operating cycles with fresh fuel--approximately 2/3 of the assemblies in the core are previously-used assemblies, while the remaining 1/3 is fresh fuel. Safety considerations for a core design include maintaining an even power distribution across all fuel assemblies--both axially and radially--as well as maintaining an even burnup distribution across the core. A major challenge for core designers is to balance safety of the design with operability and economic concerns.
Prior to working in industry, I interned at a national laboratory for two summers. There, I worked on regulatory and safety issues for the transportation of radioactive materials, including used nuclear fuel. I contributed to the development of a computer code that could determine various effects of transporting radioactive materials by truck or rail--effects including the probability of the vehicle being involved in an accident, probability of radioactive material container breach and radioactive material release, total dose to members of the public living and driving near the vehicle, and overall risk (risk = probability * consequence).
![Ceris at the control panel Ceris at the control panel](/whatisnuclear/website/raw/master/img/ceris.jpg)
Areva enrolled me as a neutronics engineer 10 months ago, a time that let me get a clear vision of my job. This article exposes my goals and how I reached them. We will discover what makes my job interesting or boring, depending on the day, and I will finally expose my feeling about it to give an answer to Nick's question: What is a nuclear engineer?
My work is to study an accident called the "one drop uncontrolled extraction". The exact description of the accident is useless in order to understand my job so I will try to explain what means "performing a methodology of study". A nuclear reactor, like any high technology and high safety product such as a plane, firstly is designed by engineers. Before building the first one, a safety commission studies very precisely the plant and perform very rigorous tests. Afterwards you get a license which gives you the authorization to build several plants. The problem is that your plant is not exactly the same as the model used during the safety instruction, consequently it has to be demonstrated that the plant still satisfies the safety requirements. Fortunately, the whole safety analysis is not repeated, you just need to show that the plant satisfies some points, chosen such in a way that the whole plant safety is established. This is exactly what is my job: find the few key points we need to check in order to be sure our plant would stay safe in case of accident. Furthermore, the method is used every time the reactor is refueled.
In order to establish those points I need to perfectly know what happens during the accident. It means I need to run simulations of the transient in all conditions, on several type of reactors. To give numbers, I guess I have run more than a thousand simulations during my 10 months of work in order to be able to extract the criterias that are going to be studied each time some new fuel is loaded in the plant.
This leads me to talk about a difficulty I encountered during my first months: each time you present a result, being able to know all the hypotheses you made - this can become tough when you run so many calculations! This is a very essential point in case a methodology error would later be discovered; we need to come back to our calculations in order to check whether or not the safety demonstration is still valid or not. Fortunately those cases are rare and anyway thanks to our data organization we would be able to check very quickly.
Something else very specific to my job is that the study has to be as accurate as possible. We are told to take the time we need in order to be really sure that our analysis is the right one. Consequently we are the lucky ones who are not so stressed by the time and who can go really deep in the analyses. We eventually have a very good understanding or the accident which is really pleasant. On the other hand, we don't have many interactions with other fields of study that can be very interesting.
Even though my first time were really hard especially because of data losses and because of the high number of parameters you have to adjust for each transient simulation. A mistake is quickly done and several of them were found in my work. Meanwhile, with time going on, I really improve and start to forget those practical problems and to focus on more theoretical and interesting subjects.
As a conclusion I would like to express on my joy of being part of the nuclear renaissance and for a pollution-free energy source. I can see it in my everyday life with the numerous new employees we welcome in our department, it is very pleasant to work in a young and motivated atmosphere.
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