“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
JUL 15, 2024
INL’s Powerful New Supercomputer, Bitterroot, arrived at INL in March 2024.
LLAW’s NUCLEAR ISSUES & COMMENTS, Monday, (07/15/2024)
I often drove by the kink in the highway at the INL (Idaho National Laboratory) back in the early to mid-1980s, travelling between Salmon City and Boise, wondering what was going on at this huge facility covering thousands of acres in east-central Idaho. But I never took the time to stop and ask for a guided tour of at least their nearby buildings and facilities and learn more precisely what they did, but never took the time. But I did know they created menus for various grades of nuclear fuel, and that was about all, yet just that much was intriguing to me in a cautiously mysterious way, partly because of the remote isolation of the place coupled with the seemingly never-ending acreage of Idaho land.
The INL’s rural headquarters and their massive surrounding Idaho landscape has always remained a once-in-awhile vague curiosity to me, so today I finally learned, at least in part, what the INL is all about. It strikes me as odd that they have named their huge supercomputer suite after Idaho mountain ranges such as Bitterroot and Sawtooth, and Lemhi. I hope it is because of a local love of countryside itself and not of the divisive power of mountain ranges symbolizing ‘all things nuclear’.
The nuclear work they do, described here, is one of many fears that worry me the most about the nuclear power industry and the nuclear world’s push to radically increase new nuclear reactors in much faster timeframes in order to speed the NRC licensing and operational requirements before nuclear reactors are activated. I am sure INL’s scientific efforts, quality educational help and advice to new plant engineering and eventual operations as they are designed, engineered, constructed, and eventually fueled, tying into an expansive and very dangerous grid system, allowing new nuclear plants to function independently of most former and present day NRC control. It is the beginning of the operational stage, from startup to shutdown, that scares the hell out of me, much like my fear of nuclear war. ~llaw
A smooth ride to the future of nuclear
July 15, 2024
By Joel Hiller
If you’ve ever driven to a remote area, you may have noticed that the drive time is much longer on dirt roads. But once those roads are paved, you can get where you need to go much more quickly. The path to deploying advanced nuclear reactors isn’t a straight line, but a new supercomputer named Bitterroot being installed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is helping to speed the journey through improved access to modeling and simulation tools.
High-performance computing allows engineers and scientists to model a wide variety of complex variables before construction begins, such as how steel or concrete degrade over time or what byproducts build up in nuclear fuel. Through advanced computer codes running on these machines, they can even model how a nuclear power plant will weather seismic events. This allows them to anticipate the reactor’s overall performance, safety and longevity.
Through the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program provides a suite of dedicated computing resources at INL for researchers from industry, universities, national laboratories and federal agencies. Now, with the installation of Bitterroot, the NSUF High Performance Computing team at INL have another resource to help speed the journey for nuclear developers around the country. Bitterroot is the name of an Idaho mountain range and continues INL’s tradition of naming its high-performance computers after Idaho landmarks.
Bitterroot will supplement the lab’s existing supercomputers at its high-performance computing data center — the Collaborative Computing Center — by adding an additional 43,008 computer processing cores with faster chips and a new capability: high-bandwidth memory. This new memory will improve performance for memory-bandwidth-limited applications like the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment, better known as MOOSE, framework. MOOSE is the foundation for many of the tools that aid advanced nuclear research that support the existing reactor fleet as well as the development and eventual licensing of new designs.
Supercomputing for nuclear innovation
“INL high performance computing is unique in that 80-90% of our compute cycles are dedicated to nuclear energy research,” said Matthew Anderson, manager of the High Performance Computing group. “Bitterroot brings us a new capability and additional capacity as we prepare for additional long-term investments in new computing resources.” As the lab makes ongoing investments in hardware such as Bitterroot, it increases INL’s ability to support the growing need for modeling and simulation across the nuclear industry.
In addition to access to Bitterroot and the other supercomputers at INL, NSUF provides organizations across the country access to experimental capabilities that would otherwise be unavailable or prohibitively costly, including irradiation and post-irradiation examination facilities for nuclear energy fuels and materials research and development.
“Not every company in the nuclear industry has its own gamma irradiation facility or supercomputer, but we’re all working toward the same goal of deploying more carbon-free nuclear energy,” said NSUF Director Brenden Heidrich.” “You never know who will make the next breakthrough, and partnerships like NSUF are vital to help level the playing field.”
The Collaborative Computing Center at INL
To support high performance computing capabilities and provide a dedicated home for its supercomputers, INL partnered with the state of Idaho to build the Collaborative Computing Center, known as C3, which was completed in 2019. C3 is a 67,000-square-foot facility equipped to host multiple supercomputers. In addition to Bitterroot, C3 is also home to NSUF High Performance Computing’s flagship supercomputer Sawtooth, ranked as the 37th fastest performing supercomputer when it was installed in 2020, along with the lab’s other systems Lemhi, Hoodoo and Viz. In fiscal year 2023, INL supercomputers provided users with 939 million core hours on more than 3.7 million jobs.
Bitterroot arrived at INL in March 2024. Now, following installation and extensive testing activities, it was made available to users on June 18.
Supercomputers like Bitterroot are improving the nuclear industry’s ability to develop and qualify new reactor technologies and avoid delays on the road to commercial deployment. To learn more about how you can access Bitterroot and INL’s other supercomputers, visit the lab’s HPC website here.
About Idaho National Laboratory
Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, celebrating 75 years of scientific innovations in 2024. The laboratory performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.
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Posted July 15, 2024Subscribe
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Monday, (07/15/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Commentary: The essence of freedom is access to information – Orlando Sentinel
Orlando Sentinel
One concerned woman, right after the explosion, went to a library looking for information about nuclear radiation exposure and discovered that all of …
Readers Write: The military’s future, autism providers, nuclear power, Taste of Minnesota
Star Tribune
That number is close to the sum of funds both for defense spending and for nondefense discretionary spending, which includes everything except fixed …
Data centers, proliferating statewide, could soon be built on mined lands in Southwest Virginia
Virginia Mercury
“There is a coordinated strategy where we’re thinking about all the projects, how there is synergy. … nuclear source like a small modular …
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Meloni seeks to bring nuclear power back to Italy – The Irish Times
The Irish Times
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government is planning to reintroduce nuclear energy 35 years after Italy shut down its last …
A Smooth Ride to the Future of Nuclear – Idaho National Laboratory
Idaho National Laboratory
Supercomputing for nuclear innovation. “INL high performance computing is unique in that 80-90% of our compute cycles are dedicated to nuclear energy …
Analysing options to finance nuclear new build
Nuclear Energy Agency
NEA event ‘Financing Nuclear New Build Today’ in Prague brought together leading experts in nuclear energy, electricity market design and …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
(No stories today)
Nuclear War
NEWS
Nuclear war never closer, CND campaigners warn as they camp outside RAF Lakenheath
Morning Star
NUCLEAR war has never been closer as Nato and Russia fight a proxy war in Ukraine and Gaza remains under siege, peace campaigners warned yesterday …
Ukraine building secret ‘robot army’; Kremlin responds to Trump assassination attempt – Sky News
Sky News
More than 45 European leaders will converge on Oxfordshire this week to discuss pressing issues, including the Ukraine-Russia war. British Prime …
North Korea threatens to boost nuke capability in reaction to US-South Korea deterrence guidelines
Jefferson City News Tribune
… nuclear war against” North Korea. The statement said its enemies’ escalating nuclear threats urgently require North Korea to further improve its …
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
North Korea threatens to boost nuke capability in reaction to US-South Korea deterrence guidelines
Jefferson City News Tribune
… nuclear war against” North Korea. The statement said its enemies’ escalating nuclear threats urgently require North Korea to further improve its …
Three key misconceptions in the debate about AI and existential risk
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Arguing about the relative importance of existential threats ignores the fundamental truth that any credible existential threat is one too many and …
NATO moves to formalise anti-China “partnership” with Indo-Pacific nations
World Socialist Web Site
… war involving nuclear armed powers, which threatens catastrophe for all mankind. … threats of global war grow. 20 June 2024. Comment. Contact us.