OPERA HPC
EURATOM funded project:
OPERA HPC “OPEn HPC theRmomechanical tools for the development of eAtf fuels“
Official web site: operahpc.eu/
Project:
Electrification of the energy sector will probably be a key step for its transition to climate-neutrality. In order to achieve it as soon as 2050, it could therefore be necessary to maintain and even extend the production capacity of Generation II and III nuclear reactors, while taking into account the evolving electricity mix and increasing requirements regarding the safety assessment of nuclear reactors. On these points, the question of nuclear fuel behaviour is essential because it sets the main constraints to be satisfied for safe operation of nuclear reactors and defines the source term for accidental conditions.
Generation II and III reactor fuels in Europe take advantage of a large experimental feedback with a continuous evolution of fuel element design and materials, which allows maintaining high safety standards while adapting to the evolution of the operating conditions. The licensing of innovative materials and fuel design requires an extension of the industrial fuel performance codes qualification in order to meet safety authority’s requirement regarding the Verification, Validation and Uncertainties Quantification process. The research and development associated to these evolutions can take a long time if experimental irradiation program is not enough optimized. This optimization is not always possible with industrial fuel performance codes usually based on a simplified geometrical fuel rod representation called 1.5D. To address this question, advanced simulation tools enabling 3D representation of the fuel rod, including models with fewer empirical parameters and taking advantage of a new generation of software environments have been developed for more than a decade.
These 3D codes still have some limitations concerning the accuracy of the description of the fuel behaviour and their use in an industrial context by a larger community. To go beyond the state of the art and to enable major advances, the OperaHPC project – OPEn HPC theRmomechanical tools for the development of eAtf fuels – will adress the following objectives:
- Advance the predictive capabilities of the simulation by improving significantly the understanding and description of the thermomechanical behaviour under irradiation of UO2 based fuel elements.
- Advance the numerical capabilities of 3D state-of-the-art fuel performance codes and propose a methodology with new physically based models taking advantage of 3D results for industrial applications. For this, the simulation of the thermomechanical behaviour of fuel rods will be bring several steps forward in terms of microstructure description, high performance computing (HPC) capabilities and reduced order modelling.
- Transfer the new results and methodologies to end-users for the licencing of new fuel concepts, including eATF. This will be possible with open source codes as well as training in order to give access to the progress made for the fuel performance codes to a broad community including the next generation of researchers.