The University of Michigan has numerous labs and researchers dedicated to investigating climate change. The Michigan Daily explored how some groups are using their research to address the challenges of climate change. You can read more stories from the project here.

As the body of research on climate change continues to grow, attention is increasingly focused on sustainable sources of energy. At the University of Michigan’s Nuclear Reactor Analysis & Methods lab, researchers focus on one specific energy source: nuclear energy. 

NuRAM is part of the larger Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences Department and is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. NuRAM models nuclear reactors to research ways to heighten their efficiency.

Nuclear reactors control nuclear chain reactions, which create heat through nuclear fission. The released heat is then utilized to create steam, activating a steam turbine that creates electricity. Nuclear reactors do not directly produce carbon dioxide or emit air pollution.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Brendan Kochunas, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences and principle investigator of NuRAM, explained the overarching research purpose of NuRAM and the Department of Energy’s interest in nuclear power research.

“What we focus on are advancing the computational methods of how we simulate and analyze nuclear reactor systems, specifically fission systems,” Kochunas said. “The projects we have are reflective of what the Department of Energy considers research priorities for the U.S.”

Andrew Panter, Rackham student in the NuRAM lab, spoke with The Daily about the effectiveness and efficiency of modeling reactors, since building and testing reactors are both costly and time-consuming.

“We all work, in some ways, on doing computer simulations of different parts of reactor physics,” Panter said. “The main goal is to facilitate better designs of reactors, or making it easier to design them or faster to design them because they’re quite complicated. It costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of time to build a test plant. If we can simulate those to a very high accuracy, it’s a lot easier to figure out what’s actually viable to build as a test.”

Kochunas described one of NuRAM’s current projects as an effort to create faster simulations of nuclear reactors.

“One of them is looking at developing faster numerical methods so we can do our simulations in a shorter time,” Kochunas said. “That’s important because when you’re designing reactors you’re running thousands, tens of thousands of simulations. And the faster you can run those, the more you can learn, the more you can iterate on your design, and the better the design you can come up with.”

Kochunas described the other projects NuRAM is currently working on, some of which involve the idea of digital twins, a virtual model of a physical system that can be used to simulate the physical system’s behavior.

“You can kind of think of (digital twins) as having a pretty accurate, fully virtual simulation of a physical system,” Kochunas said. “You can sort of interrogate and ask questions about in near real-time. We’re doing some work in developing methodologies there, and the aim of that is online monitoring. What I mean by that is: you want to know what’s going on in the system in near real-time, but you can’t measure everything. And so how can we take the things that we can measure and marry that up with simulation to get a fuller picture of what’s going on?”

In an interview with The Daily, U-M alum Thomas Folk, who previously worked at NuRAM and is currently the experiment design manager at Idaho National Lab, specified that NuRAM typically focuses on light water reactors. Folk said there has been a recent shift and increased investment into research into smaller reactors, known as advanced reactors in both NuRAM and at the national level.

“We typically focus on light water reactors, which is what’s commercially deployed in the United States now, but we’re also shifting towards more advanced reactors, which we’re starting to demonstrate here at the national labs,” Folk said.

Panter described the ways in which the lab’s research on nuclear reactors addresses the issue of climate change since nuclear power provides a clean energy solution. 

“Nuclear energy is considered a non-carbon emitting form of energy because you’re not combusting anything,” Panter said. “You’re not, in the process of making power, releasing any carbon or any greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.”

Panter said nuclear power is most useful because reactors can consistently provide the minimum amount of baseline energy to provide for customers’ needs at all hours of the day. Solar and wind power rely on daylight and consistent wind and are not necessarily able to provide this same consistency of power, according to Panter.

“The specific use case for nuclear is what we call base load or firm power, which is essentially for the energy demand in a given area,” Panter said. “There’s always some kind of baseline that you need, a certain amount of energy that even at the lowest point you’re going to need to produce that much in order to satisfy every customer in your distribution area. So that’s what nuclear is great for, as opposed to solar or wind, which are very variable in how much energy they’re producing based on the weather, for example, if the wind is blowing or if the sun is shining. Nuclear power is incredibly reliable … that’s where nuclear fits into a clean energy portfolio, alongside, of course, other technologies.”

U-M alum Marisol Garrouste, who worked at NuRAM and is currently a research engineer at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said she believes nuclear energy is an important aspect of addressing climate change. She emphasized in an interview with The Daily that climate change is not just about a healthy environment but is also intrinsically linked to the economy.

“There’s no one solution, no perfect solution, so we need to look at everything, every single aspect of the problem and every single possible solution,” Garrouste said. “Hopefully, we’ll come up with an area of solution that’s going to complement each other. And so I think nuclear has a role to play in that it’s a firm, clean energy source that could complement renewable energies. … Climate change is about the environment, but also about society, so providing jobs and a clean environment.”

Folk said, when faced with difficult problems, NuRAM researchers will often split problems into two smaller parts. 

“We do, in reactor physics, something called a two-step method where we break a large problem into two smaller problems, and we’ll perform a lot of calculations on the smaller piece of the problem, and then take those chunks and form it into a larger problem,” Folk said. “There’s a lot of assumptions and engineering approximations that go into that, and there’s a lot of different methods to make that better, in a sense of preserving the underlying accuracy of what we’re trying to do, which is figure out where the neutrons are in a reactor core.”

Garrouste said she believes there is a need for more education on the clean energy transition within the University’s undergraduate and graduate nuclear engineering programs. She said this more comprehensive education should include a combination of students seeking to fill this gap in their coursework, and professors working to integrate it into the curriculum. 

“The education of engineering undergrads and graduate students about the energy system at large is missing some key aspects,” Garrouste said. “I am lucky that I took the classes I took, and I have a better understanding of what is the place of nuclear energy. I think that’s something engineering students would really gain from understanding the whole picture. Of course, if you’re an undergrad in nuclear engineering, you want to be a good nuclear engineer, but understanding what’s the place of nuclear energy in the clean energy transition at large is very important.”

Panter described his hope for the future of nuclear power and his anticipation of more climate solutions that will result from the research of labs such as NuRAM and increasing research-based and popular support for nuclear energy.

“Nuclear energy is on the verge of what people in the industry call a renaissance,” Panter said. “There’s a lot of excitement. Public support for nuclear is definitely on the up and up. It’s a very bipartisan issue as far as the policy stuff, and there’s a lot of exciting technology coming out. I’m just really excited to see how that develops and how quickly we can turn this around and get some good climate change solutions going.”

Daily Staff Reporter Grace Schuur can be reached at gschuur@umich.edu.

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