The U.S. has been dependent on Russian uranium, importing significant amounts despite geopolitical tensions. U.S. companies spend more than $1 billion per year with Russia’s state-owned nuclear agency, Rosatom, with $411 Million spent for enriched uranium in 1Q23.
Urenco, with a $5 Billion plant in Eunice, New Mexico, currently supplies about one-third of U.S. demand for enriched uranium and is planning to boost output 15% by 2027. Combined with the parent company’s ramp up in Europe, it would be enough to cover Rosatom’s share of the U.S. market.
The Biden administration and key industry players are also exploring thorium as a more efficient and safer alternative to uranium for nuclear power. Thorium is being billed as a major hope for clean energy production that produces less waste and more energy than uranium, is meltdown proof, has no weapons-grade by-products and can even consume legacy plutonium stockpiles. Thorium is also much more widely available than uranium. Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) is working to develop a new thorium-based nuclear fuel called ANEEL (Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life) and several years ago started fitting existing reactor designs to enable them to use ANEEL fuel, which the company projected could enter commercial use as early as 2024.
MOSIMTEC simulation modeling can support multiple needs for nuclear power plants – outage planning (scheduled and unscheduled), commissioning/decommissioning plans and more. MOSIMTEC recently developed a digital twin (DT) for a nuclear fuel fabrication and assembly site. The DT had three areas of focus: (1) specification formation, model development and output validation of the model to accurately represent the system and processes (2) accurate and timely integrated data of the following data attributes: demand, materials/parts, work in process, resource status, and related information from relevant enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) and (3) organizational change management to maintain the relevant data and follow the plan as generated (rather than ad hoc decisions made on the manufacturing floor).
The deployed simulation based planning and scheduling solution provides the fuel fabrication facility with an environment to do what-if analysis (a sandbox environment for performance improvement and optimization) as well as the dynamic development of both short-term detailed scheduling and long-term capacity planning. Developing a new feasible plan now takes a few hours instead of a few weeks. MOSIMTEC data scientists and industrial engineers can help you future-proof your business.
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