Senior Engineer, Fuel Performance and Development

Location: Bellevue,Washington,United States

TITLE:              Senior Engineer, Fuel Performance and Development

LOCATION:      Bellevue, WA, USA 

TerraPower is a nuclear technology company based in Bellevue, Washington. At its core, the company is working to raise living standards globally through a more affordable, secure and environmentally friendly form of nuclear energy along with innovations in medical isotopes to improve human health. In 2006, TerraPower originated with Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries who evaluated the fundamental challenges to raising living standards around the world. They recognized energy access was crucial to the health and economic well-being of communities and decided that the private sector needed to take action and create energy sources that would advance global energy deployment. TerraPower’s mission is to be a world leader in new nuclear technologies, while developing innovators and future leaders in the nuclear field. As a result, the company’s activities in the fields of nuclear energy and related sciences are yielding significant innovations in the safety and economics of nuclear power, hybrid energy and medical applications – all for significant human health benefits.

TerraPower is seeking to hire highly motivated and forward-thinking professionals who are interested in focusing on advanced nuclear reactor research and development and influencing change within the nuclear power landscape and bringing forward the critical production of medical isotopes.  TerraPower is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. In addition, as a federal contractor, TerraPower has instituted an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP) in an effort to proactively recruit, hire, and promote women, minorities, disabled persons and veterans.

Senior Engineer, Fuel Performance and Development

TerraPower, LLC is seeking a highly motivated Senior Engineer to support the Natrium Nuclear Fuel Development and Qualification team. In this role you will contribute to the design, development, testing and qualification of nuclear fuel and other core components. You will work as part of a high functioning teams developing and qualifying fuel for the next generation of nuclear reactors.

Responsibilities

•  Perform thermo-mechanical analysis of fuel rods and other sodium fast reactor core components to support core/plant design activities, irradiation testing, and code benchmarking

•  Work with interdisciplinary team of engineers to ensure fuel and absorber designs meet their overall objectives

•  Develop fuel and material models and analysis methods

•  Compose and review technical documents to support core/reactor plant design, licensing, software verification and validation, and testing activities

•  Design and execute sensitivity studies to understand the effects and validity of various modeling assumptions, including meshing, physics coupling, material models, design tolerances

•  Train and support reactor designers and developers in the use of the design software suite

•  Development of software and databases for cataloging experiments and analysis

•  Create formal documentation of nuclear fuels methods software requirements, design, implementation, and testing in support of licensing TerraPower reactors.

•  Update, improve, and/or create software to satisfy all licensing requirements during the Validation and Verification (V&V) process

•  Support software and document reviews in areas of fuel performance modeling, fuel performance, or other areas of subject expertise

•  Build and apply methods to assess the propagation of uncertainty and their effect on safety margins

•  Enhance engineering team's ability to build models and make meaningful conclusions from simulation output through input tools, visualization, reports, etc.

Key Qualifications and Skills

•  Bachelor’s degree in Nuclear, Mechanical, or Materials Engineering.

•  A minimum of 6 years of experience in fuel performance modeling or thermo-mechanical analysis

•  Strong skills in the areas of finite element methods, heat transfer, solid mechanics, non-linear visco-elastic material behavior, behavior of nuclear fuels and irradiation effects on materials

•  Experience with numerica