Safeguards and Separations Modeling and Simulation: Reprocessing Toolkit Development

Abstract

This letter report describes the progress made in the development of a modeling and simulation toolkit for nuclear fuel reprocessing [1,2] under the DOE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. The primary function of the SafeSeps Reprocessing Plant Toolkit IPSC (RPTk) is to enable the integration of separation modules and safeguards tools (either native or third-party supplied) that simulate and/or monitor the individual separation processes in a reprocessing plant. In view of the diversity of physico-chemical processes underlying each module, the toolkit integration environment offers an interface for the modules to register in the RPTk domain based on the commonality of unit operations. This report discusses the source of this commonality from a modeling perspective and demonstrates feasibility of implementation by current working modules: namely, voloxidation, dissolution, and solvent extraction. Unit-operation commonality is a key aspect to be explored for a successful implementation of the toolkit and it impacts the design of the integration environment as discussed next. Substantial progress has been made toward the design and implementation of a native architecture and integration environment for the RPTk following the Model-Driven Systems Development (MDSD) method from IBM for software system design and code deployment [21,22]. This work is done in conjunction with the NEAMS cross-cutting Enabling Computational Technologies (ECT) element. The MDSD approach is a commercially proven method for development and deployment of large and complex software systems. The approach is iterative and it is a derivation of the Rational Unified Process framework for software engineering. At the current iteration, a vision for the software development has been stated, stakeholders identified and interviewed, prioritized use case scenarios defined, system decomposition obtained, and test development started. The IBM Rational Software Architect tool has been used to model the software development process, to provide a blue print for the design, and to transform UML (Unified Modeling Language) [23] based design into initial C++ code.