Senior Core Design Engineer

Nuclear Engineer Position at PNNL

The Nuclear Engineering Group at PNNL is seeking a nuclear engineer who possesses an understanding of nuclear power plant core design and operations. This position provides expertise to the PNNL Tritium Technology Program (TTP) team and will work directly with the project collaborative partner organization, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Fuel Engineering Department.

This position is onsite/hybrid in Richland, WA or Chattanooga, TN preferred; however, remote work may be considered.

The PNNL Tritium Technology Program provides critical technical leadership for the U.S. national security infrastructure. Established to support the National Nuclear Security Administration, the program acts as the core design authority for producing and managing tritium for national security. The program serves as the design authority for Tritium-Producing Burnable Absorber Rods (TPBARs) working closely with their partner, TVA, to safely and reliably irradiate TPBARs in Watts Bar Nuclear (WBN) Unit 1 and Unit 2 plants.

The TVA PWR Fuel Engineering department directly supports the reactor core design and reload licensing analysis needs for TVA's PWR fleet, which includes Sequoyah and WBN Unit 1 and Unit 2 plants. The department provides oversight of fuel vendor neutronics, core monitoring, operations data, and safety analysis. It also supports TVA's mission of maintaining low rates to promote economic development in the Valley by minimizing fuel costs through optimized fuel management.

In addition, the department supports Governance Oversight Execution and Support (GOES) for the PWR fleet Reactor Engineering organizations and performs in-house calculations for refueling outages, including spent fuel pool criticality and decay heat analyses.

Responsibilities to include:

• Core design development.
• Long term planning and budget evaluations for core designs.
• Evaluating program goals and changes such as loading changes and increasing tritium production.
• Target design inputs confirmation.
• Lead Use Assemblies evaluation including 50.59 and any technical reviews.
• Design initialization meeting support.
• Nuclear operations data review for long term TPBAR decay.
• Trac Works updates for tritium consolidation campaigns.
• Fuel Assembly Transfer Form development for tritium consolidation campaigns.
• Tritium consolidation campaign oversight (onsite, refuel floor).
• Development of corrective action plans.
• Overseeing/benchmarking code predictive capabilities.
• Reviewing and evaluating revised TPBAR cross sections and performing calculations to demonstrate that decay heat for tritium cores is bounded.

Additionally, you will be expected to serve as a leader for the team with the following responsibilities:

• Responsible for contributing to projects and building a professional reputation for technical expertise, while completing recurring assignments and exercising limited judgement on work details.
• Required to lead specific tasks of the project to meet scope, schedule, and budget and coordinate closely with Project Managers.
• Required to build a network within the Technical Team and Group, begin extending this network into the National Security Directorate.
• Expected to provide strong technical judgement by providing solutions to an assortment of problems using conventional methods where causal relationships are progressively difficult to establish.
• Contribute to the development of new capabilities and proposals within the Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Technologies Division.
• Expected to work with non-sensitive, sensitive, and classified information as appropriate for individual projects and should demonstrate an ability to manage sensitive business situations and influence positive outcomes. The person in this position must recognize and accept that they will be working in technical areas associated with the National Security of the United States.
• Serve as a technical mentor to junior staff.

Minimum Qualifications:

• BS/BA and 7+ years of relevant experience
  -OR-
• MS/MA and 5+ years of relevant experience
  -OR-
• PhD with 3+ years of relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• PhD degree plus 5 years of related work or educational experience.
• Master's degree plus 7 years of related work or educational experience.
• Bachelor's degree plus 10 years of related work or educational experience.
• Experience in a field directly relevant to PWR core design. Other experience in nuclear analysis is highly desirable.
• Ability to work with limited information to draw technically defensible conclusions that would support objectives of individual projects.
• Professional experience or knowledge of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or National Nuclear Security Administration practices and operations.
• Professional and educational experience applying qualitative and quantitative analytic techniques to nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear operation problems.

This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain a federal security clearance.

A security…