Office of Nuclear Energy

Current Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Dr. Peter B. Lyons

The Office of Nuclear Energy promotes nuclear power as a resource capable of meeting the Nation's energy, environmental and national security needs by resolving technical and regulatory barriers through research, development and demonstration. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Dr. Peter B. Lyons, was confirmed by the Senate on April 14, 2011. Dr. Lyons was appointed to his previous role as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy in September 2009.^[1]

The Office of Nuclear Energy is guided by the four research objectives detailed in its Nuclear Energy Research and Development Roadmap:

• Develop technologies and other solutions that can improve the reliability, sustain the safety and extend the life of current reactors.
• Develop improvements in the affordability of new reactors to enable nuclear energy to help meet the Administration’s energy security and climate change goals.
• Develop sustainable fuel cycles.
• Understand and minimize the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

Laboratories

The Office of Nuclear Energy is landlord of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Located in southern Idaho along the western edge of the Eastern Snake River Plain, INL occupies 890 square miles (2,300 km²) of a remote desert about 42 miles (68 km) from Idaho Falls. INL was established in 1949 as the “National Reactor Testing Station” by the Atomic Energy Commission. INL is the location of the historic Experimental Breeder Reactor Number I (EBR-I), which was the first nuclear reactor to generate usable electrical power.

INL is a science-based, applied engineering laboratory dedicated to supporting DOE’s research programs in nuclear energy, national and homeland security and clean energy. Work at INL has included initial development and testing of nuclear reactor designs, developing prototype reactors for use by the U.S. Navy and developing technologies to manage nuclear waste. INL is conducting research supporting the fuel cycle development and nuclear energy demonstration and deployment, as well as specialized national and homeland security applications and clean energy technologies.

Hubs

The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors(CASL) is a Department of Energy Innovation Hub that is modeling and simulating nuclear reactors with the ultimate goal of making the next generation of reactors even safer and more cost effective.

CASL brings together a team that applies existing modeling and simulation (M&S) capabilities, and is developing advanced capabilities, to create an advanced environment for simulation of light water reactors. This environment, designated the Virtual Reactor (VR), will incorporate science-based models, state-of-the-art numerical methods, modern computational science and engineering practices, and uncertainty quantification (UQ) and validation against data from operating pressurized water reactors. It will couple state-of-the-art fuel performance, neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, and structural models with existing tools for systems and safety analysis and will be designed for implementation on today’s most advanced computers and the future architecture platforms now under development by the U.S. Department of Energy.

CASL connects fundamental research and technology development through an integrated partnership of government, academia, and industry that extends across the nuclear energy sector. The CASL partner institutions possess the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to apply existing M&S capabilities to real-world reactor design issues and to develop new system-focused capabilities that will provide a foundation for advances in nuclear energy technology. CASL’s organization and management plan have been designed to promote collaboration and synergy among the partner institutions, leveraging the breadth and depth of their expertise.

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References

1. ^ Official Biography, date accessed 30 August 2011, http://energy.gov/contributors/peter-b-lyons