Summary
Access to affordable and consistent electricity is one of the big challenges facing our modern society. Nuclear energy is one answer because of its reliable output and carbon-free operation. To make this energy accessible to a larger portion of the global population further reasearch and innovation in reactor design and fuel sources is necessary, and that is where Python can help. This week Dr. Katy Huff talks about the research that she is doing, the problems facing the nuclear industry, and how she uses Python to make it happen.
Preface
- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
- I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
- When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at www.podastinit.com/linode?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app.
- Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch.
- To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
- Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dr. Katy Huff about using Python for nuclear engineering
Interview
- Introductions
- How did you get introduced to Python?
- Can you start by explaining what nuclear engineering is and give some examples of current research in the field?
- The most widely used and recognized form of nuclear plant is the light water reactor, which, to my understanding, is also the most susceptible to melt-downs and release of radioactive material carried by escaped steam. What are some of the reactor types that are currently being researched to improve safety and efficiency?
- One of the major policy and logistics issues regarding nuclear power plants is the problem of how to handle spent fuel rods. What are some of the methods that are being researched to solve this problem?
- In your PyCon presentation you mentioned the Cyclus and PyNE projects as tools that you use in your research. Can you provide a brief overview of each and explain how you use them?
- What are some of the most pressing issues in nuclear engineering and how are you leveraging Python to help with addressing them?
- How does open source software relate to open science, and how do they impact the impact the ways that research is performed?
- What are some of the current or future developments in nuclear engineering that you are most excited about?
Keep In Touch
Picks
- Tobias
- Katy
Links
- Plasma
- Nuclear Energy
- Thorium
- Uranium
- Molten Salt Reactor
- Spent fuel rods
- Yucca Mountain
- Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing
- Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor
- PyCon Keynote
- PyNE
- Cyclus
- Anthony Scopatz
- Moose Framework
- Partial Differential Equations
- REPL (Read Eval Print Loop)
- Stellarator
- Toroidal Fusion Device
- Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)
- American Nuclear Society
- NEI
- IAEA
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
[00:00:14]
Unknown:
Hello, and welcome to podcast dot in it, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable. When you're ready to launch your next project, you'll need somewhere to deploy it, so you should check out linode at ww w.podcastinnit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your app or experimenting with something that you hear about on the show. You can visit the site at www.podcastinit.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show, please leave a review on Itunes or Google Play Music. Tell your friends and coworkers and share it on social media. Your host as usual is Tobias Macy. And today I'm interviewing Katie Huff about using Python for nuclear engineering. So, Katie, could you please introduce yourself? Yeah. Hi. So I'm Katie Huff, and I'm an assistant professor in the department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois. I've been
[00:01:08] Unknown:
involved in scientific Python for some time now, and, I do nuclear engineering research in the context of advanced reactors and fuel cycles.
[00:01:17] Unknown:
Can you start by giving an overview of what nuclear engineering is and some of the current research in the field and some of the problem types that you're faced with in the course of your research?
[00:01:27] Unknown:
Sure. Absolutely. So, nuclear engineering is generally the study of, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. These have applications all over the map. Both energy, obviously, some weapons. There's some plasma applications. So in the context of more fusion type devices, there's applications related to plasma energy. And with plasmas, you can do a lot of things that are not just energy production, including etching materials or, many other things. That's not my area, but, you know, nuclear engineering sort of broadly includes all of these things. My focus is on nuclear energy, which, constitutes about 20% of the energy in the States. And it's the vast majority of our carbon free energy in the United States. So, you know, it's something we really rely on especially now and into the future as we hope to change a little bit of our carbon profile.
So it's really important. I think it's essential. You know, right now, the nuclear energy industry itself uses light water reactors. They're great. They've been safe for a really long time, And there are about a 100 of them in the United States. And there are a lot of questions around new reactor designs. Lots of people are studying very innovative designs. But, you know, a lot of people are also just studying slight changes to our current well performing light water reactors. My work is related to some of those more innovative reactor designs and specifically modeling and simulation of unique geometries, unique materials, unique nuclear physics that happen within an innovative reactor designs that might have have good, features. So I'm interested in reactor designs that are maybe better at fuel utilization, maybe better at sort of passive safety, and, maybe easier to control or produce a higher heat differential, which can be used in other applications than just energy.
So I'm interested in reactive designs that might innovate on our current fleet, and I'm also very interested in the dynamics of reprocessing and recycling used nuclear fuel and what kinds of technological challenges there are facing a recycling strategy for our current nuclear fuel and potential future nuclear fuel.
[00:03:57] Unknown:
Yeah. There are a few things that I've already planned on digging into further on in the show, but a couple of things coming out of that that I'd like to explore a bit more is in particular, 1 being the idea of alternative nuclear fuels because most people who think of nuclear energy are familiar with, you know, enriched uranium and the plutonium byproduct that has become so problematic in the global geopolitical atmosphere because of the fact that it's potentially weapons grade. And then also, particularly within the United States, the light water reactors, a number of them are aging out of their expected lifespan, but a number of them have been given extensions to the amount of time that they're allowed to run, which raises some potential safety concerns. So I'm wondering if you can just explore a bit of that to maybe fix some of public perception there or, also explain some of the ideas for future alternative fuel sources.
[00:04:50] Unknown:
Yes. So there's, there's a lot to unpack there. So I'm gonna start with sort of this concern that, plutonium is so problematic on the world stage. And, you know, I will just sort of push back against that and say that it actually, you know, most plutonium almost all plutonium produced for nuclear energy is fully accounted for. And actually, the plutonium that's caused problems, sort of, from a weapons perspective, was always intended to be made for weapons. So, you know, to my knowledge, there's no significant history at all of nuclear energy sources being, in particular, uranium reactors and their plutonium byproducts being intentionally diverted to weapon I mean, sorry, being unintentionally diverted to weapons if and only if, an institution, like the government, is pursuing nuclear weapons, you know, are those reactors used for this? So, you know, it's actually very rare that it's unintentionally diverted.
You know, I don't have any any examples of that at all. The vast majority of plutonium for weapons use has been created specifically for those weapons and and usually in customized reactors to maximize plutonium production. So actually, you know, having reactors that produce plutonium isn't so dangerous because the fuel form itself, you can't walk away with it. Right? So it's it's quite dangerous. You can't hold it in your hand, so stealing it isn't a thing. And so it doesn't it doesn't happen. However, if you reprocess that fuel, you you can separate out the plutonium, which itself is easy to hold in your hand. But in all of the cases in which we reprocess fuel, it falls into 1 of 2 categories. 1, the fuel was always intended for specifically the production of plutonium for weapons and that production is, you know, targeted at weapons and is typically not nuclear energy, like power reactors that that are involved in that. The alternative is that, like in France, for example, they've reprocessed nuclear fuel for, many decades and separated plutonium.
And by simply counting effectively the kilograms of plutonium that are produced in this way, they're able to not lose it and keep track of it. So it's all accounted for. Something else that you mentioned actually, so, addressing these, you know, I like I like these questions because they are able to, to allow me to address some of the sort of common misconceptions. So there's this concern that, current reactors are aging out of their expected lifespan. And I love the way you said that because it's quite accurate. They are aging out of their expected lifespan. The lifespan, which is 60 years, the license is 60 years for a nuclear reactor. That life lifespan was determined well before we understood 60 years. There was no safety basis for I mean, there's no significant safety basis for that 60 years because we had no no running and operating experience with reactors when we set that limit. And so actually life lifetime extensions are entirely based on the appropriateness. It's like relicensing them for safety. And so relicensing actually is going really smoothly for most reactors.
These like license extensions are going smoothly because they, reactors in the United States are exceptionally safe and they're kept in pristine condition. They are regular shutdowns to make sure that any parts that might be aging are are being replaced. The 1 part that they can't really replace is the pressure vessel, but those are holding up really, really well, significantly better than we could have possibly guessed. And and right now, I think I think there's a really strong future for license extensions upon license license extensions and the continued safe performance of those reactors. So I actually don't I don't think that there are any safety concerns with life license extensions in the United States, which is that just a really interesting sort of public perception issue, actually. Because of the over concern and regulatory oversight of our industry, I think the public perception problem stems from the fact that, you know, there's there's this perception that if a license ends, that it's expected that the reactor is too old. But in fact, we have no no reason to believe that they can't continue to operate safely.
And in fact, we have many reasons to believe they will. However, I personally am interested in advanced reactors. I don't think that they're I don't think you have to hit it 1 against each other. Another actually, I think, you know so so to your to your point about alternative fuels, like Thorium, for example, which is what you're getting at, Thorium does produce less plutonium, and generally speaking, has effectively the same reactor performance as, uranium fueled reactor. There are a few minor differences and in particular, some some reactor designs like liquid fueled reactors can be either uranium or thorium fueled, and you can get a lot better fuel utilization out of a molten salt reactor.
Historically, thorium reactors are envisioned as molten salt reactors. And so, that's why there's this public association with utilization fuel utilization in Thorium. But it's actually a little false because you can still you can use a uranium based salt, just as well as you can use a thorium based salt. So that's an interesting public perception issue. Also, the, fuel utilization in in, Thorium reactors and actually that that much better than uranium reactor if you're comparing salt to salt, for example. But what I will say is, you know, it is nice to say that it's not producing much plutonium. And generally speaking, things like salt reactors, which we've historically tested in a thorium setting, are really safe. So they have this passive safety that you get from the thermal expansion of the salt during temperature transgains. So temperature excursions. Like when the when the reaction goes supercritical, the salt heats up, the heat has a negative feedback, and it causes the reaction to slow down. So that's great. Oh, you had a great comment actually. So so you were sort of saying, like, what what's the what's the hope and direction of these of the research in this area?
It's actually my hope and direction for research in this area is that in addition to our current light water reactors, we also produce more light water reactors to replace all of our base liquid coal energy, which is killing, you know, a 170, 000 people per terawatt hour. For, for comparison, nuclear kills about maybe 90 people per terawatt hour, and that includes Fukushima and everything. So and Fukushima didn't really kill that many people from nuclear radiation, so it didn't actually kill anyone from nuclear radiation. It killed people from stress, is the estimate from the WHO. So but generally speaking, I would love to see, in addition to our current light water reactor fleet, we we should build more light water reactors to replace coal, and we should build more unique reactors, advanced reactors with more passive safety in addition to that to also replace coal. So we have a lot of coal to replace in the United States. It's a huge amount of our energy. You know, in China, it's so much worse.
So that's my hope, so we can use all of the tools in our tool belt.
[00:12:16] Unknown:
And going a little bit further afield, in terms of the availability of the fuel sources of uranium versus thorium as far as raw materials, is there a difference in terms of the estimated availability of those fuels that would push us towards 1 versus the other in terms of the designs of new reactors or the, selection of fuel sources for them?
[00:12:39] Unknown:
Yeah. So the uranium typically has to be enriched, and you can avoid some of that with the ram. But they both have almost infinite resources. And we so there have been a number of studies on how much uranium is in the world and how much thorium is in the world. You know, thorium appears in lots of places and there are a number of countries with significant thorium deposits. With uranium, the thorium the uranium deposits are a little bit more concentrated in certain nations. Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan. Like, there's a few there's a few specific nations that have significant uranium deposits. Whereas Thorium can typically be found in in basically any country.
And there are very large thorium deposits in India, for example. But generally speaking, the availability is comparable because it's effectively infinite for both. We will not overheat we will not use all that we have, especially at this rate. And there's a ton in the ocean. So something very interesting is that if we do use up all the uranium that we are capable of easily mining, then there's actually a huge resource of uranium in the ocean and the Japanese in particular, but also Americans are looking into economic ways of extracting uranium from the ocean, which has a great sustainability, factor too because it's a very passive, low environmental impact way of mining uranium.
[00:14:07] Unknown:
And going back to what you're saying too about the reuse or reenrichment of spent fuel, that's 1 of the larger policy and logistics issues that is brought up when talking about light water reactors in particular is what to do with the spent fuel rods where a number of facilities are currently just storing those rods on-site in the, hope that eventually we'll have a more concrete plan of dealing with them. In the United States, I know that there was a plan to have them all shipped to a facility that was going to be built at Yucca Mountain, which to my understanding has been put on sort of indefinite hold. So I'm wondering, what are some of the methods that are being researched to address this problem?
[00:14:46] Unknown:
Okay. So having to store spent fuel is not unique to light water reactors. And even if you reprocess, there is still some spent fuel to deal with, and it must go into ultimate disposal. It's not a huge problem. And I just want to point out that the magnitudes of waste, even if you compare us to solar, for example, then, you know, if you're talking volumes, it's just astronomically larger for solar. It's astronomically larger for coal, but we don't see the waste because it literally just goes straight into the air with coal. Alright. So with that out of the way, what I will say is that things are changing a little bit with Yucca Mountain. The most recent change in the secretary of energy has meant that there is a 120, 000, 000 in I think it's a $120, 000, 000, infusion of money into the Young Mountain project.
The app license application was under a great deal of back and forth between the department managing and the NRC and whatnot not because it was technically invalid. In fact, the NRC's report says the mountain would be a safe place and that the license application, is effectively approved. But the Department of Energy under the Obama administration chose not to complete the license application process. And so what's basically happening at the government level right now is that the license application will be completed. So, we do have a like operating license for Yuck Mountain. That aside, it's politically infeasible because, you know, the State of Nevada has made very clear that they do not want to store the waste at Yuck Mountain. So right now, the location of that waste is, as you say, on cooling pads at the reactor sites. And all that has been paid for, by 1 mill per kilowatt hour by the utilities. The cooling pads are continuing to be paid by the utilities rather than the government, even though the government was supposed to take possession of the nuclear fuel in 1998.
So you have a situation where the government has really been on its responsibility to take that fuel and that's a policy issue that's beyond sort of technical scope because it's really a technically solved problem. There are many safe ways to store this fuel. All that said, I am interested in recycling the fuel for a number of reasons. 1, fuel utilization. I care a lot about reducing the amount of mining and enrichment that we have to do. 2, I think generally speaking, reprocessing allows for slightly shorter timescales on which we need to be responsible for the fuel. We're still talking about 1, 000 of spheres but it's not tens of 1, 000 of spheres. And that's great and we should probably reprocess just because we don't know what will be happening in the world a really long time from now.
But But generally speaking, you still end up with some fuel that needs to be buried. France has been reprocessing our nuclear fuel for a long time and they have a much smaller volume and not toxicity exactly. They have a much smaller volume of nuclear spent fuel. What what else is happening internationally? I guess, Swedish have a repository concept. The, you know, there are a whole lot of nations that are looking to towards just directly burying their fuel, and there are some that are interested in France's success in reprocessing. Korea, for example, is very interested in reprocessing their spent in reprocessing spent fuel to use in sodium cooled fast reactors. But yeah, there's a lot of hope, around the possibility of recycling.
In the United States we don't do that because of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which, actually based on sort of unreasonable fear like we talked about earlier of plutonium proliferation.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Shifting topics a bit, In your PyCon keynote, you addressed a lot of the use of open source software in the context of open science. I'm wondering if you can briefly go over the ways in which the open source software movement has affected the scientific research community in the ways that research has performed.
[00:18:36] Unknown:
So open science is really important in all science, just by nature of science needing to be transparent and peer reviewable. I feel this way and many people in nuclear feel this way. A lot of work in nuclear is performed computationally for obvious reasons. It's a complex process that requires like really detailed, a priori models, You know, and experiments can be expensive and difficult. So we try to validate experiments and do very high fidelity modeling simulation and in fact for this reason, nuclear is responsible for a lot of early computation. There are a number of great projects that are very open. Pine is a good example. It's a sort of data collecting data interface for nuclear engineering. We effectively make available a a lot of the data that you can find online about nuclear probabilities and, you know, decay constants and, you know, all these kinds of types of data that nuclear engineers really need. We make those available in a single database on your system, and then we give you an API to work with it and do typical engineering simulation activities on that. You know, you want to create a material and then see what hap what it looks like after some number of years of decay. Pine is capable of doing that for you. And it's got a great Python interface and a great C plus plus interface.
The lead developer on the project right now is Anthony Scopetz, but there's a number of people from the universities, the national labs, all working with, with this piece of code. Also, actually, the startups in nuclear that are looking at advanced reactor technology. Some of some of the employees of those startups also contribute to time. So that's 1 good example. It's a great Python package for nuclear engineering and it, you know, it tries to be in a simple analysis interface for a lot of typical problems in nuclear engineering. Another great example actually is the Moose framework, which is this multi physics object oriented simulation environment. It was created in the context of nuclear, but is actually extremely useful for lots of flying to the fields. And so that's created by the Idaho National Laboratory and it's an open source finite element, modeling framework that, uses some very clever PDE solution techniques to make fully coupled solves a very complex geometry is possible, for basically any partial differential equation matrix.
So, I use Moose to do advanced reactor multi physics. Lots of other people use Moose to do advanced reactor multi physics. There's a great, there's a great set of results out there in context of nuclear and in Moose. Moose is a c plus plus, project, but it's really amazing and no matter what science you're in, you might be interested in it. 1 other great project is Cyclist, which is mostly c plus plus but some Python. And it, it helps to assess. So I I helped to start this project and there are a whole lot of other people working on it now. And it's effectively an agent based simulator for the nuclear fuel cycle at a high level. So instead of looking at the very close detail of the multi physics inside a single reactor, what we're interested is the long term, 100 of years, 100 of reactors dynamic of our larger nuclear energy enterprise. And so it's sort of like SimCity for the nuclear industry. And that piece of code is also open. I think what what that does for science is in part discoverability, but obviously mostly reproducibility and transparency.
You know, when I am doing science, I don't want don't want someone to ever wonder what it was I was trying to do or if, I don't want them to wonder if I've done something wrong and then not be able to check. It's very important for people to be able to look at what I've done in science and be able to check whether it's correct, to be able to double check, you know, that I have the right intentions. You know, I'm always trying my best, so I don't even mind if the code is a little ugly. You know, this this small level of embarrassment is tiny in comparison to the importance of transparency in science. And so, you know, I think a lot of people are on board in nuclear for that. So it's a really it's a good time in nuclear for open science.
[00:22:51] Unknown:
And so going back a bit to nuclear engineering in particular, what are some of the most pressing issues and what are some of the ways that you're using Python to help with addressing
[00:23:02] Unknown:
them? Man, so I think the most pressing issue right now is related to nuclear innovation. So because we have very strong regulatory body, which is an amazing and important thing, innovation is stifled a little bit. So it's always safety first in nuclear. We are extremely focused on a constant and unperturbable record of safety, especially in the United States nuclear power industry. And so anything new needs to undergo a great deal of review. And so new reactor designs and new ideas about accident tolerant fuels and new ideas about the way that modeling and simulation might inform our safety case for some of these reactors has to undergo much more review than you would in basically any other industry. The only comparable industry might be the airline industry, actually, which has a similarly heavy handed regulator, which is good. Right? Keeps us safe. But, the big problem and and sort of challenge is how do we make innovations happen in nuclear in the face of this sort of universe? Also, nuclear is an extremely expensive endeavor, but is great in the long term.
Now venture capitalists want quick turnaround on their investments. And so how exactly do you fund a nuclear energy startup if that, you know, if that design might take 10 years to perfect and 10 years to license and, you know, 30 years after that to build and make a profit. You know, now the profits will be huge because nuclear actually, you know, makes electricity very cheaply per per dollar you put into it over its very long lifetime. But, you know, will that will that be enough for a venture capitalist and the kind of money and effort that's needed to sustain those designs. So that's an interesting, interesting thing facing nuclear energy right now is this kind of difficulty in innovation. There's a lot of things going on right now. In fact, there's some bipartisan effort on the hill to make sure that there there are laboratory facilities accessible to start ups and innovators so that those people can do the kinds of experiments they need to do in order to back up their safety case for license applications.
That initiative is called GAIN and it's really amazing. And I think these kinds of things are really a hopeful sign for future innovation in nuclear.
[00:25:21] Unknown:
And what are some of the applications of Python in the process of exploring the innovations with in order to reduce the upfront costs and upfront facility creation necessary to be able to explore those potentials?
[00:25:36] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think you put your finger right on it. Right? So, like, it's all about exploring. And Python gives you the ability to avoid all the sort of developer effort, right? It really allows the developer to play around, prototype things like having the REPL, you know, really makes Python something that's prototypable. Generally speaking, you can get in there and try stuff really quickly. And generally speaking, that's important for start ups. They need to be able to get in, try stuff, and get an idea, and, like, bound the error with some simple calculations before they run any really high fidelity supercomputer style, national laboratory, multi physics simulations.
You know, and I think that's great. And I think for innovating either at a university or in a in a startup, that prototyping capability is really important for not wasting scientists' time, and it's really only possible with Python. I think you can have C plus plus and Fortran on the back end, But a Python front end makes everything everything so much faster.
[00:26:36] Unknown:
And from what I was able to gather reading through the documentation, it seems like Cyclos in particular is 1 of the interfaces that allows for that rapid prototyping and evaluation because of the fact that it does give you the option of modeling computationally the life cycles of the fuel and the ways that it can be reprocessed
[00:26:55] Unknown:
or in different contexts, in different reactor types without necessarily having to actually go out and physically perform those actions on it. That's right. And sort of a big system level analysis can point out the kinds of small sort of technical details that can have a big impact on the world. You know, if you do a big system level analysis of this without recycling capability, it's nice if it can take a very short amount of time because that can target, you know, what smaller level details, what kind of fuel fuel utilization you need to look at, what kind of like reprocessing metrics you need to be, focused on because you're able to do much better sensitivity analysis on those smaller levels, sort of lower level details of the reactor or the recycling process.
So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really essential to be able to sort of get that big picture pretty quickly and then dive down. And that's what Cygnus is capable of doing. It's that big picture.
[00:27:46] Unknown:
And what are some of the current or future developments in nuclear engineering that you're most excited about and most looking forward to?
[00:27:53] Unknown:
Man, so I think we're really at a precipice. There are something like 40 nuclear reactors startups right now. And, you know, not all of them will succeed. Right? In in the reality, you know, we'll be very lucky if 3 of them successfully build new machines here in the United States. Now, I do think some of them will be licensed elsewhere. But, you know, I think it's a really exciting time to watch which ones are gonna succeed. You know, We've got molten salt reactor designs. We've got, like, other liquid metal fuel designs. There's, like, there are small modular light water designs. There are small modular but fleetable I don't know how to describe the NuScale reactor design but, especially interesting modular reaction designs like the NuScale design. There's just there's an enormous myriad sort of set of reactor designs out there, and it's it's kind of a fascinating race that's really just started in the last 5 years, to see whose reactor designs are gonna be cheap enough to deploy and, like, best for the world and easiest to license and, like, strongest case for the future of nuclear energy. We've got a lot of smart people working on it. It's gonna look good.
[00:29:04] Unknown:
And 1 of the other areas that nuclear is often seen is in the context of things like submarines or spacecraft where it's an energy source that's easy to compartmentalize and ship and gives a long operating lifespan
[00:29:19] Unknown:
without a lot of the logistical and technical issues of other fuel sources. So what are some of the most interesting applications of that that you see coming down the road? You know, those are 2 great examples, and I think they've been really demonstrated pretty clearly. 1 really interesting interesting thing that I think about a lot is hybrid energy systems. So right now we're seeing a change in the electric grid such that power generation because of wind and solar being sort of variable in their delivery. Like, I love renewables and I think they're part of the mix. Know, but I wanna see how base load type energy like nuclear power could fit in and enable those renewables. And 1 way is if you sometimes divert extra energy on the grid produced by your base load flat line nuclear power, which always produces the same amount of energy no matter what kind of polar vortex is happening. That amount of energy, you should be able to sort of divert some fraction of it to another process.
So processes like desalination of water, right, very important in California, less important in other states, but something very important to keep in mind as an option. Hydrogen production, so it's very high heat, high temperature reactors that are sort of on the horizon. We may be able to produce hydrogen with the excess energy from a high heat nuclear reactor. There's, high purity steel making can be done with this extra, like, heat. There's a whole a whole fleet of these kinds of hybrid energy system ideas where you co locate a desalination plant or a hydrogen production plant or a steel production plant at the nuclear reactor in order to help keep the grid stable.
And that allows actually enables renewables to take effect where it might be challenging them to fit into the grid appropriately otherwise. So I think these hybrid energy systems are really, really strong future for nuclear energy.
[00:31:06] Unknown:
And I know you mentioned that it's not really in your particular day to day work, but fusion is another subject that a lot of people are interested in. And from my understanding, it produces more energy per reaction than fission. And so I'm wondering if there are any new developments in that sphere that you're, keeping an eye on.
[00:31:26] Unknown:
You know, I'm lucky to be at 1 of the best fusion energy plasma type departments in the United States. So, the the department here in Illinois has a very strong plasma fusion group. And they have a fabulous troival fusion device called a stellarator. Here on campus it's called Hydra. And, you know, there they're doing some basic fusion energy research that's gonna be really fundamental to the future. And in France, there's a construction project that's, you know, getting ready to be completed. It's possibly the most complex, reactor ever built, but it's, it's called ITER and, it's an international collaboration towards a steroidal fusion type device. And, you know, I'm really interested to see how it goes. I think the challenges facing fusion right now are 100% in the materials.
You know, it can be really hard on the vessel to have 1 of these very high energy density plasmas inside, any any containment and the vessel really suffers in the context of fusion and it makes the makes the reaction hard to sustain. And in fact, you know, we may still be looking at 50 years until it's sustained energy like net positive fusion reaction. So right now, getting sort of net energy positive out of a fusion reaction despite despite the the better, energy per reaction, getting enough reactions to happen on their own can be very difficult in fusion. We just haven't quite harnessed the sun just yet.
[00:32:57] Unknown:
And going back briefly to open science, I know that in your talk, you mentioned the fact that you're involved with the Journal of Open Source Software as a way to help researchers sort of escape the publisher perish mindset and actually get some recognition for the work that they're doing and the software that they develop. So I'm wondering if you can just give a bit of a background on that effort and, some of your hopes for it.
[00:33:20] Unknown:
Oh, man. Yeah. I'm so lucky to be included in JOS, which is a collaborative project among a lot of people. It was mostly started by Arvin Smith, who was previously at GitHub. It's a brand new sort of idea for publishing software. You know, it goes 1 step beyond the, you know, just assign it a digital object identifier type strategy. And that step is real technical review of the code and the code's capabilities. And, you know, I think that's that's new in the world and it's enabled by GitHub and it's enabled by people who, you know, see value scientific value in research software. And I think I think it's something to watch.
You know, we've gone over a 100, publications this year in our very first year and I think we see, you know, nothing but increase in interest. You know, if you have a piece of research software out there in the world, you know, definitely consider publishing it and its many versions in JOS because I think it's good both for your own recognition and for the code itself. I think we've definitely seen a lot of code improve particularly, you know, the usability of build systems and the test suites and stuff in some of the software improved through the review process at JaaS. Yeah. So I think it's an amazing thing. I'm thrilled to be part of it and I really hope to see it succeed.
[00:34:38] Unknown:
And are there any other topics that you think we should cover before we start to close out the show?
[00:34:42] Unknown:
No. I really enjoyed this interview. I I know I talked a lot about nuclear. So yeah. That's always really fun for me, but, you know, I recognize that maybe less for your listeners, so feel free to add it a little bit.
[00:34:55] Unknown:
Alright. So with that, I'll have you add your preferred contact information to the show notes so anybody who's interested can follow-up with you and keep track of the research that you're doing in the developments in the field. Actually, 1 other thing that I meant to ask is for somebody who does want to find out more about nuclear engineering and keep up to date with the current state of the art? What are some of the best resources for them to look at?
[00:35:17] Unknown:
The American Nuclear Society has, an institute called the Center For Nuclear Science and Technology Information CNSTI and that's where I would direct most people. For information on the nuclear industry, there's something called NEI, and for sort of international policy stuff, I would direct people to the IAEA. All of these acronyms can be Googled pretty quickly if you just add nuclear to them.
[00:35:44] Unknown:
Yeah. And I'll add links in the show notes to all of those resources. Great. Alright. So with that, I'll move us to the picks. And for my picks this week, I just recently finished renovating my kitchen and as such ended up buying a number of different tools in the process. So my pick this week is gonna be the, Ryobi brand of tools because they're, inexpensive while still having a pretty good feature set for somebody who needs to be able to get work done without necessarily, investing in full professional grade tools that they're not necessarily going to use in a professional context. And with that, I'll pass it to you. Do you have any picks for us today?
[00:36:19] Unknown:
I also have Ryobi, in my home. Nice drill set. Yes. So I would like to direct people to this series about nuclear, a book series. It starts with Atomic Awakening followed by Atomic Accidents. And most recently, just last week, Atomic Adventures. It's written by this great, great author, James Meaffee. And, you know, I have had so much fun reading these books, and I recognize that they're written for someone with a slight scientific bent, but they're definitely digestible by the regular public. And they are so interesting. He really goes through some of the most interesting parts of nuclear energy, from a sort of historic and philosophical perspective, the atomic accidents book is out of this world fascinating.
He goes through like basically every criticality accident primarily in the history of weapons production in the world. And it is fascinating, absolutely fascinating stuff. With lots of, like, good juicy human details because that's how accidents happen. It turns out it's humans. So, yeah, I strongly recommend this series of books, which are totally digestible by the ordinary public and really, really fun.
[00:37:31] Unknown:
All right. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to tell us all more about nuclear engineering and some of the research that you're involved with and the ways that Python can be leveraged to push the industry forward. So thank you for that, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Hello, and welcome to podcast dot in it, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable. When you're ready to launch your next project, you'll need somewhere to deploy it, so you should check out linode at ww w.podcastinnit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your app or experimenting with something that you hear about on the show. You can visit the site at www.podcastinit.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show, please leave a review on Itunes or Google Play Music. Tell your friends and coworkers and share it on social media. Your host as usual is Tobias Macy. And today I'm interviewing Katie Huff about using Python for nuclear engineering. So, Katie, could you please introduce yourself? Yeah. Hi. So I'm Katie Huff, and I'm an assistant professor in the department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois. I've been
[00:01:08] Unknown:
involved in scientific Python for some time now, and, I do nuclear engineering research in the context of advanced reactors and fuel cycles.
[00:01:17] Unknown:
Can you start by giving an overview of what nuclear engineering is and some of the current research in the field and some of the problem types that you're faced with in the course of your research?
[00:01:27] Unknown:
Sure. Absolutely. So, nuclear engineering is generally the study of, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. These have applications all over the map. Both energy, obviously, some weapons. There's some plasma applications. So in the context of more fusion type devices, there's applications related to plasma energy. And with plasmas, you can do a lot of things that are not just energy production, including etching materials or, many other things. That's not my area, but, you know, nuclear engineering sort of broadly includes all of these things. My focus is on nuclear energy, which, constitutes about 20% of the energy in the States. And it's the vast majority of our carbon free energy in the United States. So, you know, it's something we really rely on especially now and into the future as we hope to change a little bit of our carbon profile.
So it's really important. I think it's essential. You know, right now, the nuclear energy industry itself uses light water reactors. They're great. They've been safe for a really long time, And there are about a 100 of them in the United States. And there are a lot of questions around new reactor designs. Lots of people are studying very innovative designs. But, you know, a lot of people are also just studying slight changes to our current well performing light water reactors. My work is related to some of those more innovative reactor designs and specifically modeling and simulation of unique geometries, unique materials, unique nuclear physics that happen within an innovative reactor designs that might have have good, features. So I'm interested in reactor designs that are maybe better at fuel utilization, maybe better at sort of passive safety, and, maybe easier to control or produce a higher heat differential, which can be used in other applications than just energy.
So I'm interested in reactive designs that might innovate on our current fleet, and I'm also very interested in the dynamics of reprocessing and recycling used nuclear fuel and what kinds of technological challenges there are facing a recycling strategy for our current nuclear fuel and potential future nuclear fuel.
[00:03:57] Unknown:
Yeah. There are a few things that I've already planned on digging into further on in the show, but a couple of things coming out of that that I'd like to explore a bit more is in particular, 1 being the idea of alternative nuclear fuels because most people who think of nuclear energy are familiar with, you know, enriched uranium and the plutonium byproduct that has become so problematic in the global geopolitical atmosphere because of the fact that it's potentially weapons grade. And then also, particularly within the United States, the light water reactors, a number of them are aging out of their expected lifespan, but a number of them have been given extensions to the amount of time that they're allowed to run, which raises some potential safety concerns. So I'm wondering if you can just explore a bit of that to maybe fix some of public perception there or, also explain some of the ideas for future alternative fuel sources.
[00:04:50] Unknown:
Yes. So there's, there's a lot to unpack there. So I'm gonna start with sort of this concern that, plutonium is so problematic on the world stage. And, you know, I will just sort of push back against that and say that it actually, you know, most plutonium almost all plutonium produced for nuclear energy is fully accounted for. And actually, the plutonium that's caused problems, sort of, from a weapons perspective, was always intended to be made for weapons. So, you know, to my knowledge, there's no significant history at all of nuclear energy sources being, in particular, uranium reactors and their plutonium byproducts being intentionally diverted to weapon I mean, sorry, being unintentionally diverted to weapons if and only if, an institution, like the government, is pursuing nuclear weapons, you know, are those reactors used for this? So, you know, it's actually very rare that it's unintentionally diverted.
You know, I don't have any any examples of that at all. The vast majority of plutonium for weapons use has been created specifically for those weapons and and usually in customized reactors to maximize plutonium production. So actually, you know, having reactors that produce plutonium isn't so dangerous because the fuel form itself, you can't walk away with it. Right? So it's it's quite dangerous. You can't hold it in your hand, so stealing it isn't a thing. And so it doesn't it doesn't happen. However, if you reprocess that fuel, you you can separate out the plutonium, which itself is easy to hold in your hand. But in all of the cases in which we reprocess fuel, it falls into 1 of 2 categories. 1, the fuel was always intended for specifically the production of plutonium for weapons and that production is, you know, targeted at weapons and is typically not nuclear energy, like power reactors that that are involved in that. The alternative is that, like in France, for example, they've reprocessed nuclear fuel for, many decades and separated plutonium.
And by simply counting effectively the kilograms of plutonium that are produced in this way, they're able to not lose it and keep track of it. So it's all accounted for. Something else that you mentioned actually, so, addressing these, you know, I like I like these questions because they are able to, to allow me to address some of the sort of common misconceptions. So there's this concern that, current reactors are aging out of their expected lifespan. And I love the way you said that because it's quite accurate. They are aging out of their expected lifespan. The lifespan, which is 60 years, the license is 60 years for a nuclear reactor. That life lifespan was determined well before we understood 60 years. There was no safety basis for I mean, there's no significant safety basis for that 60 years because we had no no running and operating experience with reactors when we set that limit. And so actually life lifetime extensions are entirely based on the appropriateness. It's like relicensing them for safety. And so relicensing actually is going really smoothly for most reactors.
These like license extensions are going smoothly because they, reactors in the United States are exceptionally safe and they're kept in pristine condition. They are regular shutdowns to make sure that any parts that might be aging are are being replaced. The 1 part that they can't really replace is the pressure vessel, but those are holding up really, really well, significantly better than we could have possibly guessed. And and right now, I think I think there's a really strong future for license extensions upon license license extensions and the continued safe performance of those reactors. So I actually don't I don't think that there are any safety concerns with life license extensions in the United States, which is that just a really interesting sort of public perception issue, actually. Because of the over concern and regulatory oversight of our industry, I think the public perception problem stems from the fact that, you know, there's there's this perception that if a license ends, that it's expected that the reactor is too old. But in fact, we have no no reason to believe that they can't continue to operate safely.
And in fact, we have many reasons to believe they will. However, I personally am interested in advanced reactors. I don't think that they're I don't think you have to hit it 1 against each other. Another actually, I think, you know so so to your to your point about alternative fuels, like Thorium, for example, which is what you're getting at, Thorium does produce less plutonium, and generally speaking, has effectively the same reactor performance as, uranium fueled reactor. There are a few minor differences and in particular, some some reactor designs like liquid fueled reactors can be either uranium or thorium fueled, and you can get a lot better fuel utilization out of a molten salt reactor.
Historically, thorium reactors are envisioned as molten salt reactors. And so, that's why there's this public association with utilization fuel utilization in Thorium. But it's actually a little false because you can still you can use a uranium based salt, just as well as you can use a thorium based salt. So that's an interesting public perception issue. Also, the, fuel utilization in in, Thorium reactors and actually that that much better than uranium reactor if you're comparing salt to salt, for example. But what I will say is, you know, it is nice to say that it's not producing much plutonium. And generally speaking, things like salt reactors, which we've historically tested in a thorium setting, are really safe. So they have this passive safety that you get from the thermal expansion of the salt during temperature transgains. So temperature excursions. Like when the when the reaction goes supercritical, the salt heats up, the heat has a negative feedback, and it causes the reaction to slow down. So that's great. Oh, you had a great comment actually. So so you were sort of saying, like, what what's the what's the hope and direction of these of the research in this area?
It's actually my hope and direction for research in this area is that in addition to our current light water reactors, we also produce more light water reactors to replace all of our base liquid coal energy, which is killing, you know, a 170, 000 people per terawatt hour. For, for comparison, nuclear kills about maybe 90 people per terawatt hour, and that includes Fukushima and everything. So and Fukushima didn't really kill that many people from nuclear radiation, so it didn't actually kill anyone from nuclear radiation. It killed people from stress, is the estimate from the WHO. So but generally speaking, I would love to see, in addition to our current light water reactor fleet, we we should build more light water reactors to replace coal, and we should build more unique reactors, advanced reactors with more passive safety in addition to that to also replace coal. So we have a lot of coal to replace in the United States. It's a huge amount of our energy. You know, in China, it's so much worse.
So that's my hope, so we can use all of the tools in our tool belt.
[00:12:16] Unknown:
And going a little bit further afield, in terms of the availability of the fuel sources of uranium versus thorium as far as raw materials, is there a difference in terms of the estimated availability of those fuels that would push us towards 1 versus the other in terms of the designs of new reactors or the, selection of fuel sources for them?
[00:12:39] Unknown:
Yeah. So the uranium typically has to be enriched, and you can avoid some of that with the ram. But they both have almost infinite resources. And we so there have been a number of studies on how much uranium is in the world and how much thorium is in the world. You know, thorium appears in lots of places and there are a number of countries with significant thorium deposits. With uranium, the thorium the uranium deposits are a little bit more concentrated in certain nations. Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan. Like, there's a few there's a few specific nations that have significant uranium deposits. Whereas Thorium can typically be found in in basically any country.
And there are very large thorium deposits in India, for example. But generally speaking, the availability is comparable because it's effectively infinite for both. We will not overheat we will not use all that we have, especially at this rate. And there's a ton in the ocean. So something very interesting is that if we do use up all the uranium that we are capable of easily mining, then there's actually a huge resource of uranium in the ocean and the Japanese in particular, but also Americans are looking into economic ways of extracting uranium from the ocean, which has a great sustainability, factor too because it's a very passive, low environmental impact way of mining uranium.
[00:14:07] Unknown:
And going back to what you're saying too about the reuse or reenrichment of spent fuel, that's 1 of the larger policy and logistics issues that is brought up when talking about light water reactors in particular is what to do with the spent fuel rods where a number of facilities are currently just storing those rods on-site in the, hope that eventually we'll have a more concrete plan of dealing with them. In the United States, I know that there was a plan to have them all shipped to a facility that was going to be built at Yucca Mountain, which to my understanding has been put on sort of indefinite hold. So I'm wondering, what are some of the methods that are being researched to address this problem?
[00:14:46] Unknown:
Okay. So having to store spent fuel is not unique to light water reactors. And even if you reprocess, there is still some spent fuel to deal with, and it must go into ultimate disposal. It's not a huge problem. And I just want to point out that the magnitudes of waste, even if you compare us to solar, for example, then, you know, if you're talking volumes, it's just astronomically larger for solar. It's astronomically larger for coal, but we don't see the waste because it literally just goes straight into the air with coal. Alright. So with that out of the way, what I will say is that things are changing a little bit with Yucca Mountain. The most recent change in the secretary of energy has meant that there is a 120, 000, 000 in I think it's a $120, 000, 000, infusion of money into the Young Mountain project.
The app license application was under a great deal of back and forth between the department managing and the NRC and whatnot not because it was technically invalid. In fact, the NRC's report says the mountain would be a safe place and that the license application, is effectively approved. But the Department of Energy under the Obama administration chose not to complete the license application process. And so what's basically happening at the government level right now is that the license application will be completed. So, we do have a like operating license for Yuck Mountain. That aside, it's politically infeasible because, you know, the State of Nevada has made very clear that they do not want to store the waste at Yuck Mountain. So right now, the location of that waste is, as you say, on cooling pads at the reactor sites. And all that has been paid for, by 1 mill per kilowatt hour by the utilities. The cooling pads are continuing to be paid by the utilities rather than the government, even though the government was supposed to take possession of the nuclear fuel in 1998.
So you have a situation where the government has really been on its responsibility to take that fuel and that's a policy issue that's beyond sort of technical scope because it's really a technically solved problem. There are many safe ways to store this fuel. All that said, I am interested in recycling the fuel for a number of reasons. 1, fuel utilization. I care a lot about reducing the amount of mining and enrichment that we have to do. 2, I think generally speaking, reprocessing allows for slightly shorter timescales on which we need to be responsible for the fuel. We're still talking about 1, 000 of spheres but it's not tens of 1, 000 of spheres. And that's great and we should probably reprocess just because we don't know what will be happening in the world a really long time from now.
But But generally speaking, you still end up with some fuel that needs to be buried. France has been reprocessing our nuclear fuel for a long time and they have a much smaller volume and not toxicity exactly. They have a much smaller volume of nuclear spent fuel. What what else is happening internationally? I guess, Swedish have a repository concept. The, you know, there are a whole lot of nations that are looking to towards just directly burying their fuel, and there are some that are interested in France's success in reprocessing. Korea, for example, is very interested in reprocessing their spent in reprocessing spent fuel to use in sodium cooled fast reactors. But yeah, there's a lot of hope, around the possibility of recycling.
In the United States we don't do that because of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which, actually based on sort of unreasonable fear like we talked about earlier of plutonium proliferation.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Shifting topics a bit, In your PyCon keynote, you addressed a lot of the use of open source software in the context of open science. I'm wondering if you can briefly go over the ways in which the open source software movement has affected the scientific research community in the ways that research has performed.
[00:18:36] Unknown:
So open science is really important in all science, just by nature of science needing to be transparent and peer reviewable. I feel this way and many people in nuclear feel this way. A lot of work in nuclear is performed computationally for obvious reasons. It's a complex process that requires like really detailed, a priori models, You know, and experiments can be expensive and difficult. So we try to validate experiments and do very high fidelity modeling simulation and in fact for this reason, nuclear is responsible for a lot of early computation. There are a number of great projects that are very open. Pine is a good example. It's a sort of data collecting data interface for nuclear engineering. We effectively make available a a lot of the data that you can find online about nuclear probabilities and, you know, decay constants and, you know, all these kinds of types of data that nuclear engineers really need. We make those available in a single database on your system, and then we give you an API to work with it and do typical engineering simulation activities on that. You know, you want to create a material and then see what hap what it looks like after some number of years of decay. Pine is capable of doing that for you. And it's got a great Python interface and a great C plus plus interface.
The lead developer on the project right now is Anthony Scopetz, but there's a number of people from the universities, the national labs, all working with, with this piece of code. Also, actually, the startups in nuclear that are looking at advanced reactor technology. Some of some of the employees of those startups also contribute to time. So that's 1 good example. It's a great Python package for nuclear engineering and it, you know, it tries to be in a simple analysis interface for a lot of typical problems in nuclear engineering. Another great example actually is the Moose framework, which is this multi physics object oriented simulation environment. It was created in the context of nuclear, but is actually extremely useful for lots of flying to the fields. And so that's created by the Idaho National Laboratory and it's an open source finite element, modeling framework that, uses some very clever PDE solution techniques to make fully coupled solves a very complex geometry is possible, for basically any partial differential equation matrix.
So, I use Moose to do advanced reactor multi physics. Lots of other people use Moose to do advanced reactor multi physics. There's a great, there's a great set of results out there in context of nuclear and in Moose. Moose is a c plus plus, project, but it's really amazing and no matter what science you're in, you might be interested in it. 1 other great project is Cyclist, which is mostly c plus plus but some Python. And it, it helps to assess. So I I helped to start this project and there are a whole lot of other people working on it now. And it's effectively an agent based simulator for the nuclear fuel cycle at a high level. So instead of looking at the very close detail of the multi physics inside a single reactor, what we're interested is the long term, 100 of years, 100 of reactors dynamic of our larger nuclear energy enterprise. And so it's sort of like SimCity for the nuclear industry. And that piece of code is also open. I think what what that does for science is in part discoverability, but obviously mostly reproducibility and transparency.
You know, when I am doing science, I don't want don't want someone to ever wonder what it was I was trying to do or if, I don't want them to wonder if I've done something wrong and then not be able to check. It's very important for people to be able to look at what I've done in science and be able to check whether it's correct, to be able to double check, you know, that I have the right intentions. You know, I'm always trying my best, so I don't even mind if the code is a little ugly. You know, this this small level of embarrassment is tiny in comparison to the importance of transparency in science. And so, you know, I think a lot of people are on board in nuclear for that. So it's a really it's a good time in nuclear for open science.
[00:22:51] Unknown:
And so going back a bit to nuclear engineering in particular, what are some of the most pressing issues and what are some of the ways that you're using Python to help with addressing
[00:23:02] Unknown:
them? Man, so I think the most pressing issue right now is related to nuclear innovation. So because we have very strong regulatory body, which is an amazing and important thing, innovation is stifled a little bit. So it's always safety first in nuclear. We are extremely focused on a constant and unperturbable record of safety, especially in the United States nuclear power industry. And so anything new needs to undergo a great deal of review. And so new reactor designs and new ideas about accident tolerant fuels and new ideas about the way that modeling and simulation might inform our safety case for some of these reactors has to undergo much more review than you would in basically any other industry. The only comparable industry might be the airline industry, actually, which has a similarly heavy handed regulator, which is good. Right? Keeps us safe. But, the big problem and and sort of challenge is how do we make innovations happen in nuclear in the face of this sort of universe? Also, nuclear is an extremely expensive endeavor, but is great in the long term.
Now venture capitalists want quick turnaround on their investments. And so how exactly do you fund a nuclear energy startup if that, you know, if that design might take 10 years to perfect and 10 years to license and, you know, 30 years after that to build and make a profit. You know, now the profits will be huge because nuclear actually, you know, makes electricity very cheaply per per dollar you put into it over its very long lifetime. But, you know, will that will that be enough for a venture capitalist and the kind of money and effort that's needed to sustain those designs. So that's an interesting, interesting thing facing nuclear energy right now is this kind of difficulty in innovation. There's a lot of things going on right now. In fact, there's some bipartisan effort on the hill to make sure that there there are laboratory facilities accessible to start ups and innovators so that those people can do the kinds of experiments they need to do in order to back up their safety case for license applications.
That initiative is called GAIN and it's really amazing. And I think these kinds of things are really a hopeful sign for future innovation in nuclear.
[00:25:21] Unknown:
And what are some of the applications of Python in the process of exploring the innovations with in order to reduce the upfront costs and upfront facility creation necessary to be able to explore those potentials?
[00:25:36] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think you put your finger right on it. Right? So, like, it's all about exploring. And Python gives you the ability to avoid all the sort of developer effort, right? It really allows the developer to play around, prototype things like having the REPL, you know, really makes Python something that's prototypable. Generally speaking, you can get in there and try stuff really quickly. And generally speaking, that's important for start ups. They need to be able to get in, try stuff, and get an idea, and, like, bound the error with some simple calculations before they run any really high fidelity supercomputer style, national laboratory, multi physics simulations.
You know, and I think that's great. And I think for innovating either at a university or in a in a startup, that prototyping capability is really important for not wasting scientists' time, and it's really only possible with Python. I think you can have C plus plus and Fortran on the back end, But a Python front end makes everything everything so much faster.
[00:26:36] Unknown:
And from what I was able to gather reading through the documentation, it seems like Cyclos in particular is 1 of the interfaces that allows for that rapid prototyping and evaluation because of the fact that it does give you the option of modeling computationally the life cycles of the fuel and the ways that it can be reprocessed
[00:26:55] Unknown:
or in different contexts, in different reactor types without necessarily having to actually go out and physically perform those actions on it. That's right. And sort of a big system level analysis can point out the kinds of small sort of technical details that can have a big impact on the world. You know, if you do a big system level analysis of this without recycling capability, it's nice if it can take a very short amount of time because that can target, you know, what smaller level details, what kind of fuel fuel utilization you need to look at, what kind of like reprocessing metrics you need to be, focused on because you're able to do much better sensitivity analysis on those smaller levels, sort of lower level details of the reactor or the recycling process.
So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really essential to be able to sort of get that big picture pretty quickly and then dive down. And that's what Cygnus is capable of doing. It's that big picture.
[00:27:46] Unknown:
And what are some of the current or future developments in nuclear engineering that you're most excited about and most looking forward to?
[00:27:53] Unknown:
Man, so I think we're really at a precipice. There are something like 40 nuclear reactors startups right now. And, you know, not all of them will succeed. Right? In in the reality, you know, we'll be very lucky if 3 of them successfully build new machines here in the United States. Now, I do think some of them will be licensed elsewhere. But, you know, I think it's a really exciting time to watch which ones are gonna succeed. You know, We've got molten salt reactor designs. We've got, like, other liquid metal fuel designs. There's, like, there are small modular light water designs. There are small modular but fleetable I don't know how to describe the NuScale reactor design but, especially interesting modular reaction designs like the NuScale design. There's just there's an enormous myriad sort of set of reactor designs out there, and it's it's kind of a fascinating race that's really just started in the last 5 years, to see whose reactor designs are gonna be cheap enough to deploy and, like, best for the world and easiest to license and, like, strongest case for the future of nuclear energy. We've got a lot of smart people working on it. It's gonna look good.
[00:29:04] Unknown:
And 1 of the other areas that nuclear is often seen is in the context of things like submarines or spacecraft where it's an energy source that's easy to compartmentalize and ship and gives a long operating lifespan
[00:29:19] Unknown:
without a lot of the logistical and technical issues of other fuel sources. So what are some of the most interesting applications of that that you see coming down the road? You know, those are 2 great examples, and I think they've been really demonstrated pretty clearly. 1 really interesting interesting thing that I think about a lot is hybrid energy systems. So right now we're seeing a change in the electric grid such that power generation because of wind and solar being sort of variable in their delivery. Like, I love renewables and I think they're part of the mix. Know, but I wanna see how base load type energy like nuclear power could fit in and enable those renewables. And 1 way is if you sometimes divert extra energy on the grid produced by your base load flat line nuclear power, which always produces the same amount of energy no matter what kind of polar vortex is happening. That amount of energy, you should be able to sort of divert some fraction of it to another process.
So processes like desalination of water, right, very important in California, less important in other states, but something very important to keep in mind as an option. Hydrogen production, so it's very high heat, high temperature reactors that are sort of on the horizon. We may be able to produce hydrogen with the excess energy from a high heat nuclear reactor. There's, high purity steel making can be done with this extra, like, heat. There's a whole a whole fleet of these kinds of hybrid energy system ideas where you co locate a desalination plant or a hydrogen production plant or a steel production plant at the nuclear reactor in order to help keep the grid stable.
And that allows actually enables renewables to take effect where it might be challenging them to fit into the grid appropriately otherwise. So I think these hybrid energy systems are really, really strong future for nuclear energy.
[00:31:06] Unknown:
And I know you mentioned that it's not really in your particular day to day work, but fusion is another subject that a lot of people are interested in. And from my understanding, it produces more energy per reaction than fission. And so I'm wondering if there are any new developments in that sphere that you're, keeping an eye on.
[00:31:26] Unknown:
You know, I'm lucky to be at 1 of the best fusion energy plasma type departments in the United States. So, the the department here in Illinois has a very strong plasma fusion group. And they have a fabulous troival fusion device called a stellarator. Here on campus it's called Hydra. And, you know, there they're doing some basic fusion energy research that's gonna be really fundamental to the future. And in France, there's a construction project that's, you know, getting ready to be completed. It's possibly the most complex, reactor ever built, but it's, it's called ITER and, it's an international collaboration towards a steroidal fusion type device. And, you know, I'm really interested to see how it goes. I think the challenges facing fusion right now are 100% in the materials.
You know, it can be really hard on the vessel to have 1 of these very high energy density plasmas inside, any any containment and the vessel really suffers in the context of fusion and it makes the makes the reaction hard to sustain. And in fact, you know, we may still be looking at 50 years until it's sustained energy like net positive fusion reaction. So right now, getting sort of net energy positive out of a fusion reaction despite despite the the better, energy per reaction, getting enough reactions to happen on their own can be very difficult in fusion. We just haven't quite harnessed the sun just yet.
[00:32:57] Unknown:
And going back briefly to open science, I know that in your talk, you mentioned the fact that you're involved with the Journal of Open Source Software as a way to help researchers sort of escape the publisher perish mindset and actually get some recognition for the work that they're doing and the software that they develop. So I'm wondering if you can just give a bit of a background on that effort and, some of your hopes for it.
[00:33:20] Unknown:
Oh, man. Yeah. I'm so lucky to be included in JOS, which is a collaborative project among a lot of people. It was mostly started by Arvin Smith, who was previously at GitHub. It's a brand new sort of idea for publishing software. You know, it goes 1 step beyond the, you know, just assign it a digital object identifier type strategy. And that step is real technical review of the code and the code's capabilities. And, you know, I think that's that's new in the world and it's enabled by GitHub and it's enabled by people who, you know, see value scientific value in research software. And I think I think it's something to watch.
You know, we've gone over a 100, publications this year in our very first year and I think we see, you know, nothing but increase in interest. You know, if you have a piece of research software out there in the world, you know, definitely consider publishing it and its many versions in JOS because I think it's good both for your own recognition and for the code itself. I think we've definitely seen a lot of code improve particularly, you know, the usability of build systems and the test suites and stuff in some of the software improved through the review process at JaaS. Yeah. So I think it's an amazing thing. I'm thrilled to be part of it and I really hope to see it succeed.
[00:34:38] Unknown:
And are there any other topics that you think we should cover before we start to close out the show?
[00:34:42] Unknown:
No. I really enjoyed this interview. I I know I talked a lot about nuclear. So yeah. That's always really fun for me, but, you know, I recognize that maybe less for your listeners, so feel free to add it a little bit.
[00:34:55] Unknown:
Alright. So with that, I'll have you add your preferred contact information to the show notes so anybody who's interested can follow-up with you and keep track of the research that you're doing in the developments in the field. Actually, 1 other thing that I meant to ask is for somebody who does want to find out more about nuclear engineering and keep up to date with the current state of the art? What are some of the best resources for them to look at?
[00:35:17] Unknown:
The American Nuclear Society has, an institute called the Center For Nuclear Science and Technology Information CNSTI and that's where I would direct most people. For information on the nuclear industry, there's something called NEI, and for sort of international policy stuff, I would direct people to the IAEA. All of these acronyms can be Googled pretty quickly if you just add nuclear to them.
[00:35:44] Unknown:
Yeah. And I'll add links in the show notes to all of those resources. Great. Alright. So with that, I'll move us to the picks. And for my picks this week, I just recently finished renovating my kitchen and as such ended up buying a number of different tools in the process. So my pick this week is gonna be the, Ryobi brand of tools because they're, inexpensive while still having a pretty good feature set for somebody who needs to be able to get work done without necessarily, investing in full professional grade tools that they're not necessarily going to use in a professional context. And with that, I'll pass it to you. Do you have any picks for us today?
[00:36:19] Unknown:
I also have Ryobi, in my home. Nice drill set. Yes. So I would like to direct people to this series about nuclear, a book series. It starts with Atomic Awakening followed by Atomic Accidents. And most recently, just last week, Atomic Adventures. It's written by this great, great author, James Meaffee. And, you know, I have had so much fun reading these books, and I recognize that they're written for someone with a slight scientific bent, but they're definitely digestible by the regular public. And they are so interesting. He really goes through some of the most interesting parts of nuclear energy, from a sort of historic and philosophical perspective, the atomic accidents book is out of this world fascinating.
He goes through like basically every criticality accident primarily in the history of weapons production in the world. And it is fascinating, absolutely fascinating stuff. With lots of, like, good juicy human details because that's how accidents happen. It turns out it's humans. So, yeah, I strongly recommend this series of books, which are totally digestible by the ordinary public and really, really fun.
[00:37:31] Unknown:
All right. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to tell us all more about nuclear engineering and some of the research that you're involved with and the ways that Python can be leveraged to push the industry forward. So thank you for that, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Introduction and Guest Introduction
Overview of Nuclear Engineering
Alternative Nuclear Fuels and Reactor Lifespan
Spent Fuel Management and Recycling
Open Source Software in Scientific Research
Challenges in Nuclear Innovation
Future Developments in Nuclear Engineering
Hybrid Energy Systems and Fusion Research
Journal of Open Source Software
Resources for Learning About Nuclear Engineering
