Illuminating Emerging Supply Chain and Waste Management Challenges

In this work, we propose to add capabilities to Cyclus, an agent-based fuel cycle simulator, to address current and future fuel cycle and supply chain challenges. Potential disruptions to the supply chain may be geopolitical in nature (e.g. sanctions) or localized in nature (e.g., manufacturing plant shutdown, facility closure), therefore our tools need to reflect supply dynamics regionally. Further, our tools need to reflect potential constraints or effects on the back-end of the fuel cycle (e.g. SNF mass or repository capacity). We propose updating Cyclus to include enhanced modeling of supply chain dynamics, regional and temporal variability in material needs, and expanded models appropriate for variations in reactor fueling strategies. These updates will allow Cyclus to better capture the engineering and supply chain aspects of the emerging nuclear fuel cycles driven by a panoply of advanced reactor designs of varying sizes and fuel strategies. We will seek community engagement in designing these features and plan to host a workshop to build community knowledge of these features once they are implemented. All improvements will be made using best practices for open-source software, encouraging collaboration and integration of new members of the Cyclus users community.