The PreCalc Project—Software Framework for Plutonium Processing

Plutonium dioxide has been the subject of many different studies over the past decades due to its role in nuclear fuels and nuclear wastes. Many studies are performed on lab-scale batch processes which have been shown to provide a product with different characteristics from plant-scale production. The PreCalc project works to combine previously developed and new models for use in the plant-scale environment of “real-world” PuO₂ synthesis. The multi-scale, multi-stage software framework developed will be capable of systematically predicting PuO₂ product characteristics by modeling both precipitation and calcination processes. The development of such a framework provides an avenue for plant-scale process optimization and can provide an avenue for synthetic data to be utilized by future inverse models for nuclear forensics applications. The results presented here provides an illustration of the current capabilities of the PreCalc software as well as future efforts to be included.