Profile

I moved to the UK at the age of 16 when my dad got a job here in Derby. I enrolled to my local Sixth Form college, where I worked quite hard to get good grades, and I got accepted to study Chemical Engineering with Nuclear Technology at the University of Sheffield. After I finished my degree, I got a Graduate Engineer job at Torness Nuclear Power Station, about 40min east of Edinburgh. I since have left that role (after working there for about 7 months), and now work as a Thermal Hydraulics Engineer at Rolls-Royce SMR.

Though I place quite a lot of value on my career and my education, that isn’t all there is to me! Studying at university was a life-changing experience for me, where before I used to be really introverted and kept to myself, while now I am really social and extroverted. I love spending time with my friends and chatting about basically anything, and I really like having fun (whether it’s music, going for a swim in the Lake District, or anything really!)

Computers and computer codes are quite good at modelling a lot of physical phenomena, and we as engineers can model quite a lot of things very accurately using just computers. However, in the nuclear industry, it is not good enough to build a computer model of your nuclear reactor. Even if you build a computer model of your reactor, and all the results and numbers seem and sound right, it is not 100% good enough.

We have to build scaled down test rigs for the nuclear reactor and the surrounding systems (pressuriser, steam generators, etc.), and we have to run tests using these scaled down test rigs. We collect the data from the tests that are ran on these test rigs, and we put all this data together and we verify and validate it (V&V as it’s called). Once we are satisfied that all these numbers check out, then we are 100% certain that we have designed a reactor that works as intended, and that we haven’t missed anything.

My job specifically is to develop the computer models of these scaled down test rigs. These test rigs are surprisingly complicated to model, and unless we have a solid idea of what their behaviour is like, we cannot go ahead and build them, and we cannot proceed with the assessment process of the reactor design.

My day-to-day can vary sometimes. Some days I have to attend a lot of meetings and provide my opinion on things. In the nuclear industry, we have this acronym called SQEP, which stands for Suitably Qualified and Experienced Person. If you are a SQEP’d individual, that means you can provide your view on things and you can sign off on things (such as drawings, calculations, diagrams, etc.).

Most days however involve just programming. The nuclear reactor we are designing is cooled with water, and the software code we use for modelling the thermal-hydraulic phenomena (flow rates, flow regimes, pressures, temperatures, velocities, etc.) is called RELAP5-3D, which we shorten to RELAP.

RELAP is really old since it was written in the 60s, and it is essentially programmed using machine code input inside a text file. This can be really difficult and time consuming, which is why it can take up so much of my day.

What we are essentially trying to do is make sure that the models of the test rigs we are designing are correct and accurate of reality, and we use internal processes to achieve this.