Title:

Atomistic modeling of advanced nuclear fuels to drive fuel performance modeling

Speaker:

Dr. Benjamin Beeler

Affiliation:

North Carolina State University

When:

Thursday, August 27, 2020 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Room https://bluejeans.com/181713558

Host:

Dr. Chaitanya S Deo
cdeo3@gatech.edu

Abstract

The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission envision a future beyond light water reactors where advanced reactor concepts are developed, qualified and implemented. These advanced reactor concepts include sodium cooled faster reactors, lead-cooled fast reactors, molten salt reactors, fluoride salt cooled high temperature reactor, gas cooled reactors, and a number of micro and modular based reactor designs. In order to qualify each of these reactor designs, the behavior of the fuel must be stable and predictable. Fuel performance modeling is utilized to describe both steady state and transient behavior of the reactor, and calculate key lifetime limiting materials specific phenomena. The accurate prediction of fuel evolution under irradiation requires implementation of correct thermodynamic and kinetic properties into mesoscale and continuum level fuel performance modeling codes. Regretfully, there is a dramatic shortage in the requisite data needed to fully parametrize physics based models governing fuel evolution. However, atomistic modeling can provide key insights into fundamental thermophysical properties that can aid in the description of nuclear fuels and how they evolve in reactor. This presentation will describe such efforts that have been undertaken for metallic fuels, and that are beginning to be undertaken for molten salts.

Biography

Dr. Beeler received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Nuclear and Radiological Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a post doctoral researcher jointly at the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, he was a computational scientist in the Computational Microstructure Science group in the Fuels Modeling and Simulation department at Idaho National Laboratory. He is the current lead of the Microstructure Fuel Performance Modeling working group for the United Stated High Performance Research Reactor program. His professional interests are atomistic description and evolution of nuclear fuel and structural materials. He has extensive experience on interatomic potential development, particularly related to uranium and uranium-alloys. He has studied a number of phenomena in nuclear materials including radiation damage, effects of strain on point defects, diffusion, free surface and grain boundary properties, fission gas bubbles, thermal transport and optical properties. His research has primarily utilized density functional theory, molecular dynamics and phase field methods.