The U.S. Department of Energy announced USD 27M in funding for 9 projects as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA-E) Generating Electricity Managed by Intelligent Nuclear Assets (GEMINA) program. These projects will work to develop digital twin technology to reduce operations and maintenance (O&M) costs in the next generation of nuclear power plants by 10-times to make them more economical, flexible, and efficient.
GEMINA teams will develop digital twins and associated technologies for advanced nuclear reactors to strategically design O&M frameworks for the next generation of nuclear power plants. These teams are designing tools to introduce greater flexibility in reactor systems, increase autonomy in operations, and speed up design iteration, with a goal of reducing costs at advanced reactor power plants.
The projects will work to lower O&M costs by using diverse technologies that are driving efficiencies across other industries, such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced control systems, predictive maintenance, and model-based fault detection. The teams will develop digital twin technologies for robust O&M strategies that can facilitate, among other things, more flexible operations for integration into an electrical grid with a large fraction of intermittent generation resources.
