Los Alamos nuclear enterprise resource and infrastructure model (LA-NERIM)

In this nascent global 'Nuclear Renaissance', potential shortages of human resources and supply chains have become the top concerns for the policymakers and industry leaders. A number of industry studies have examined the potential supply shortages in qualified labors for specific deployment scenarios, the general shortage in nuclear engineers, and ways to ramp up educational and training pipelines. A Los Alamos National Laboratory team has been developing a nuclear enterprise resource and infrastructure model (LA-NERIM) to provide a dynamic and versatile tool for the systematic study of resource needs and flows. LA-NERIM is built around a stock-and-flow model of the nuclear fuel cycle model using the iThinkTM software, with modules and connections describing all the front-end, reactor operation and back-end processes. It is driven by nuclear power demand growth. We are using LA-NERIM to study the human resource development (HRD) needs for a number of scenarios for US and Russia. The US study includes a comparison of three scenarios of maintaining current capacity, expansion at 500 MWe/yr and maintaining current market share. We are also examining the impact of the sharply peaked demographics of the ageing US nuclear workforce on future growth. LA-NERIM can be modularized with more detailed labor categories and customer defined boundary conditions to provide high fidelity projection of dynamic staffing needs for nuclear vendors, owner/operators and suppliers. With different kinds of inputs, LA-NERIM can be used to project needs of other resources, such as concrete, steels, capital outlays and manufacturing capacities. Coupled with data from NFCSim, another Los Alamos code that calculates the quantities and isotopic compositions in the flows of nuclear materials throughout the fuel cycles, LA-NERIM has the potential to become a powerful and versatile system tool for policymakers and industry leaders to examine and compare the feasibilities and impacts of various policy options and deployment scenarios, and for consultants, practitioners and educators to plan and implement well informed development programs. (author)