The U.S. Department of Energy’s announcement last month to establish the National Reactor Innovation Center creates an important hub for research and development. With DOE at the center, creative reactor developers can work together to scale up and integrate decades of data and design work. DOE’s established open-source software programs already present a great tradition of collaboration and co-development. This is a great way to accelerate the deployment of advanced nuclear technologies in the U.S. and beyond.
Since the beginning, TerraPower has hastened its pace of innovation with smart software. We had to develop ways to input and make sense of decades of data. Our engineers worked hard to create ways to do multiphysics testing on hundreds of different reactor variations in almost real time. We’ve made good progress and can test concepts in hours that, just a few years ago, would’ve taken months or even years.
We have proven internally how our advanced reactor modeling interface software is complementary to the proprietary physics kernels of TerraPower and the DOE labs, which users may obtain separately. Now we want to help realize these gains throughout the industry. That is why we are making the framework portion of our advanced reactor modeling interface open-source. We are excited to work to complement the efforts of DOE in its mission to develop and demonstrate advanced reactor technologies.
