Nuclear startup NAAREA will use Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE to develop its next generation nuclear reactors in the virtual realm.
Most people have some opinion about nuclear energy and its relative levels of danger and risk versus the reward it promises as a sustainable energy source. Even the National Academy of Engineering presents approaches from both sides of the nuclear energy debate in their NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering. The NAE believes that one of the engineering challenges society should pursue is to that of providing energy from fusion. On the opposite side of that coin is the engineering challenge to prevent so-called “nuclear terror.”
French nuclear startup NAAREA is asking the question, “Can nuclear energy be a widely used sustainable power source?” The company wants to push nuclear energy as the world’s best hope to reach energy independence. Toward this goal, NAAREA has achieved several key partnerships, including a big one with Dassault Systèmes that was announced at the World Nuclear Exhibition. NAAREA will use Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform to help develop its next-generation nuclear reactor in the virtual realm.
Instead of the NAE’s grand Challenges, NAAREA chooses to focus on the 17 Sustainability Goals outlined by the United Nations from its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. NAAREA is aware of the huge moonshot-level thinking and resources required to position nuclear energy as a widely used energy source, and the company is betting that the collaboration and design tools afforded by the 3DEXPERIENCE will help.
How Cloud-Based Systems Benefit SMEs
Dassault Systèmes calls itself “a catalyst for human progress.” One of the company’s main goals is building virtual environments for its customers to engineer products faster, more efficiently and more sustainably. As engineers, when we think of Dassault we might think of CATIA, SOLIDWORKS or SOLIDWORKS Simulation, but the company now hopes we frame these design and simulation tools as part of an online piece of the overall PLM system.
Pulling all of a project’s assets into a cloud-based platform is a solid method for a smaller company like NAAREA. Their engineers and programmers are spread out geographically and speak an array of different languages, so a central repository of data can benefit everyone. Pushing the high-end computing requirements to the cloud servers will give the customer a little relief on the cost of processors, and data stored in one place can be accessed regardless of the worker’s shift or time zone.
3DEXPERIENCE now offers apps that start in the early project management phase and governance tools all the way through manufacturing with DELMIA and PLM with ENOVIA. The collaboration aspects of the software even help to develop marketing images and assets with 3DEXCITE, giving all employees access to the same revisions and options of a product.
How NAAREA Plans to Push the Boundaries of Engineering and Energy
NAAREA is working with the three goal statements laid out in the World Energy Council’s Trilemma Index, and believes that energy sources must be:
- Safe for the territories where they operate.
- Economical and competitive to support economic growth.
- Clean, to fight against climate change.
These three constraints don’t seem too far off from the project management scope triangle that makes any project beholden to the requirements of cost, time and quality.
NAAREA believes that its three key innovations will help to drive society toward a renewable energy future.
Their first innovation is the extra small molten reactor (XSMR.) XSMRs are micro-reactors that use spent nuclear material and thorium as fuel sources, essentially pulling the last of the remaining energy from substances that would otherwise be regarded as nuclear waste. These reactors usually produce between 1-40 MW of energy. They would operate autonomously and be suitable for small remote areas where power transmission infrastructure has not traditionally been provided. NAAREA expects these reactors to have a run time of around ten years without needing any connection to a larger power grid.
Molten-salt reactors are the second innovation proposed by NAAREA. these reactors have both fans and detractors in the energy world. After Canada’s recent announcement of money being invested into this technology, some critics doubled down on possible issues with molten-salt reactors: That specialized fuel is needed to run the reactors, and that the fissile materials that result from the reactor processes could be used to make nuclear weapons. The major argument against molten-salt reactors that has always made the most sense to this author is the idea that molten salt is chemically corrosive and having so much of it inside a system is bound to corrode it over time.
However, history has shown a few times that these types of reactors have the potential not only to work but also to thrive as autonomous systems. The Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) operated in 1954 as a 2.5 MW reactor, with the goal of providing nuclear reactors capable of propelling aircraft. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory operated a molten-salt reactor, but after logging more than 13,000 hours at full power the experimental reactor was shut down in 1969. NAAREA is betting that these past successes will serve as a base for its own upcoming molten-salt reactors with modern innovations.
The last innovation is the fuel that will run the reactors. NAAREA expects to use spent radioactive materials from a variety of sources to run the XSMRs. They estimate that 2,300,000 tons of thorium is already available in the world, and this material is expected to power the reactors without requiring extraction of any natural resources. Additionally, the idea that waste radioactive material and thorium exist in several places already should give NAAREA several opportunities to implement proof-of-concept reactors at sites around the globe.
What Does It All Mean?
NAAREA is operating with ‘big startup energy.’ The major players have decades of experience in the engineering and energy fields, but NAAREA is essentially a company that started in November 2021 and then made huge partnership announcements in its first few months of operation. Beyond the Dassault announcement, the company also announced a partnership where French engineering company Assystem will provide project management, permitting, integration and engineering services to NAAREA in support of the XSMR. NAAREA looks to be handling the big picture work while bringing in other organizations to operate almost modularly, with each arm of the amalgamated team working on the things that it does the best.
Curiously, Assystem and Dassault also released their news that the two companies will partner to ‘enhance the performance of the nuclear industry.’ They have worked together since 2016, but felt that stronger ties would aid in more efficiently bringing the world into this next generation of nuclear reactors, with a focus on Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Integrating supply chains, managing change control, coordinating different product configuration and supporting project management functions are the main areas of the agreement between Dassault and Assystem.
The huge scope of next-generation nuclear power development is exactly the type of project that digital twins are built to support. Safety concerns are ever-present and having a strong simulation model set and digital twins built to follow the reactor progress will help manage those concerns. Beyond the safety concerns are the issues we already expect digital twins and product lifecycle management to handle.
Setting up completely new reactor systems in several different parts of the world and using engineers and programmers from several different countries is the perfect moonshot-sized application for Dassault to use its 3DEXPERIENCE platform to help NAAREA catalog its diverse data and make it available to all collaborators. As engineers and designers, it should be comforting to know that our data is safe and accessible while change control is being tracked so that all members of our project team can work with the same information and purpose.
