Transition Scenario Demonstrations of CYCAMORE Demand Driven Deployment Capabilities

In many fuel cycle simulators, the user must define a deployment scheme for all supporting facilities to avoid supply chain gaps. To ease setting up nuclear fuel cycle simulations, Nuclear Fuel Cycle (NFC) simulators should bring demand-responsive deployment decisions into the dynamics of the simulation logic. Thus, a next-generation NFC simulator should predictively and automatically deploy fuel cycle facilities to meet a user-defined power demand.

CYCLUS is an agent-based nuclear fuel cycle simulation framework [4]. In CYCLUS, each entity (i.e. Region, Institution, or Facility) in the fuel cycle is an agent. Region agents represent geographical or political areas that institution and facility agents can be grouped into. Institution agents control the deployment and decommission of facility agents and represents legal operating organizations such as a utility, government, etc. Facility agents represent nuclear fuel cycle facilities. CYCAMORE provides agents to represent process physics of various components in the nuclear fuel cycle (e.g. mine, fuel enrichment facility, reactor).

The Demand-Driven CYCAMORE Archetypes project (NEUP-FY16-10512) aims to develop CYCLUS’ demand-driven deployment capabilities. This capability is added as a CYCLUS Institution agent that deploys facilities to meet the front-end and back-end fuel cycle demands based on a user-defined commodity demand. This demand-driven deployment capability is called d3ploy.

In this paper, we explain the capabilities of d3ploy and demonstrate how d3ploy minimizes undersupply of all commodities in a few simulations while meeting key simulation constraints. Constant, linearly increasing, and sinusoidal power demand transition scenarios are demonstrated. Insights are discussed to inform parameter input decisions for future work in setting up larger transition scenarios that include many facilities. And finally, the more complex transition scenarios are demonstrated.