Senior Engineer, Fuel Performance and Development

Talascend is currently seeking a Senior Engineer, Fuel Performance and Development for a remote, contract opportunity with our client.

Overview

In this role you will contribute to the design, development, testing and qualification of nuclear fuel and other core components.

Responsibilities

• Perform thermo-mechanical analysis of fuel rods and other sodium fast reactor core components to support core/plant design activities, irradiation testing, and code benchmarking.
• Work with interdisciplinary team of engineers to ensure fuel and absorber designs meet their overall objectives.
• Develop fuel and material models and analysis methods.
• Compose and review technical documents to support core/reactor plant design, licensing, software verification and validation, and testing activities.
• Design and execute sensitivity studies to understand the effects and validity of various modeling assumptions, including meshing, physics coupling, material models, design tolerances.
• Development of software and databases for cataloging experiments and analysis.
• Create formal documentation of nuclear fuels methods software requirements, design, implementation, and testing in support of licensing reactors.
• Update, improve, and/or create software to satisfy all licensing requirements during the Verification and Validation (V&V) process.
• Support software and document reviews in areas of fuel performance modeling, fuel performance, or other areas of subject expertise.
• Build and apply methods to assess the propagation of uncertainty and their effect on safety margins.
• Enhance engineering team's ability to build models and make meaningful conclusions from simulation output through input tools, visualization, reports, etc.
• Support irradiation testing by performing fuel performance assessments for pre-test predictions or support interpretation of test results, prepare test plans, and prepare test reports summarizing results.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Nuclear, Mechanical, or Materials Engineering.
• A minimum of 6 years of experience in fuel performance modeling or thermo-mechanical analysis.

Requirements

• Strong skills in the areas of finite element methods, heat transfer, solid mechanics, non-linear visco-elastic material behavior, behavior of nuclear fuels and irradiation effects on materials.
• Experience with numerical methods and computational algorithms.
• Programs: ABAQUS, ANSYS, COMSOL, MOOSE, or equivalent FEA codes.
• Programming languages: PYTHON, FORTRAN.
• Experience in understanding and executing nuclear fuel design and analysis methodologies ideally with a focus on fast-neutron reactors.
• Experience interfacing with manufacturing vendors/engineers to account for the impacts of manufacturing tolerances/limitations on component design.
• Excellent technical writing, communication, and presentation skills.
• Attention to detail and aspiration for technical excellence.
• Possess ability to work on tasks that require a multi-disciplinary approach.
• Experience in performing design activities to applicable requirements such as NQA-1, ASME B&PV, AWS, 10 CFR 50, Appendix B, or equivalent preferred.
• Experience interacting on nuclear methodology with the NRC under an ASME NQA-1 compliant QA environment preferred.
• Excellent “under-the-hood” knowledge of the methods of reactor physics analysis, finite element models, constitutive material models desired.
• Ability to integrate and automate simulation tools desired.
• Ability to consistently deliver to an aggressive schedule.
• Self-motivated: able to seek out tasks and produce value aligned with team goals without waiting for next assignment.
• Willingness to openly give and accept professional criticism through technical reviews and other venues.
• Travel required: 0-5%.