Nuclear Packaging Laboratory

Man standing in front of fire.

Professor Greiner in front of a large-scale fire test conducted in 2007 with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.

Nuclear and other radioactive materials are used for life-saving medical diagnostics and treatments, electricity generation without greenhouse gas emission, national defense, advanced measurements, food sterilization, and other purposes.  
For society to benefit from these important uses, packaging that protects the public and the environment during the storage, transport, and disposal of these hazardous materials must be developed and safely operated. Federal regulations require that these package work properly under normal as well as severe fire, crash, and other accident conditions.  Professional opportunities in industry, national laboratories, and government agencies are available for engineers with nuclear packaging safety interest and expertise. The University of Nevada, Reno Mechanical Engineering Department’s Nuclear Packaging Program has performed packaging research since 1993.  Please the Nuclear Packaging faculty if you would like additional information, or to become involved in Nuclear Packaging Program activities.

Nuclear packaging faculty

Nuclear Packaging
Miles Greiner
Miles Greiner
Foundation Professor
(775) 784-4873
WPEB 216
5514
Nuclear Packaging
Mustafa Hadj-Nacer
Mustafa Hadj-Nacer
Research Assistant Professor
(775) 682-7480
PE 219
5514
 

Opportunities for Student Involvement

Funded and for-credit opportunities are available for qualified graduate and undergraduate students who would like to gain experience and research expertise related to nuclear packaging safety and thermal/fluid science. These opportunities involve working with faculty members and other students. Several students from this program are now employed in related fields. Additionally, the University of Nevada, Reno Graduate Fellowship in Nuclear Power funds US citizens and permanent residents, who are interested in working for nuclear industry, national labs, or government agencies, to earn MS and Ph.D. degrees.

 

Research and Government Service

Since 1993, the US Department of Energy (DOE), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the State of Nevada, and industry have funded fundamental and applied research to better understand the performance and improve the safety of nuclear packaging.  This research involves thermal/fluid science experiments that replicate the conditions of packaging under normal operating conditions, as well as severe hypothetical and historic fire accidents.  Program students, faculty and staff have used this data to create and validate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models.  They then use those models to predict package performance under a wide variety of normal and potential accident conditions.  Government agencies have funded this work to better understand the level of safety that used-nuclear-fuel packages, which are licensed by the federal government, provide during severe accidents.

Current Research Activities

Earlier Research and Government Service Activities

Related Thermal/Fluid Science Research

Program faculty, students and staff have performed a wide range of related thermal/fluid science research, focusing on heat transfer augmentation, space system thermal management, and other important applications.  This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DOE, NASA and other agencies and industry.  We will add links to this page to describe these research programs.

 

Student Testimonials

I became interested in nuclear packaging during my final year of the mechanical engineering B.S. program at UNR. I found it was an excellent opportunity to earn a master’s degree through a funded research position.... My research position and internships have been great opportunities for learning the computer simulation programs that I will be using in the industry.

Joel Kaderka

Hometown: Lotus, Calif.

Joel Kaderka on the Quad

Dilesh Maharjan

Peachtree Corners, Georgia
Nuclear Packaging Program from August 2013 to June 2018

When I joined UNR for the PhD program, I did not have any knowledge of Nuclear Packaging. After talking to Dr. Miles Greiner in the first few days, I became aware of this field and the work he and his team were doing. Fortunately, the work was mainly concentrated on the areas of my interest i.e., Thermal and Fluid science. As I became familiar with the processes and requirements related to nuclear packaging, and the impact of research work that could be done in this field, I wanted to be part of the team.

My research at UNR mainly focused on vacuum drying of Spent Nuclear Fuel. SNF goes through a drying process when it is removed from underwater pools and placed in air-filled canisters, to ensure that all water is removed before the canisters containing the fuel are sealed. One way of drying is by evacuating the container. During vacuum drying, the temperature of SNF tends to increase due to gas rarefaction. It is very important to keep the temperature below certain critical limits. My research at UNR focused on modeling the rarefied gas condition using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to predict the temperature of SNF. Initially, we verified a simple two-dimensional CFD model against results from proven methods like the Shakov Model Kinetic Equation and the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Additionally, we constructed an experimental setup, with a 7x7 array of heated rods inside a square pressure tube, to emulate a real fuel assembly inside the canister. I validated CFD results from an accurate three-dimensional model of the experimental setup against the experimental results.

I am working as a Thermal Engineer in NAC International since June 2018, after I completed by PhD. I am working in very much the same field as my PhD research work, doing thermal analysis of transport and storage systems of Spent Nuclear Fuel for various clients. I am very thankful for the skills I learned and experiences I accumulated during my time in UNR, which have made it easier to adapt to professional life.

Venkata Venigalla

Hyderabad, India

Venkata Venigalla

I was introduced to the field of nuclear packaging during my Master’ program at the University of Nevada, Reno working as a Graduate Research Assistant for Professor Miles Greiner. I became interested in this work observing the various projects that were being handled under Professor Greiner and his doctoral students. The sheer size of the packages and the level of detail that goes into designing them furthered my interest to develop a deeper understanding of the thermal performance.

At UNR, I worked on extensively on simulating the thermal response of nuclear waste transportation cask engulfed in various fire scenarios. As part of this work, we developed various studies to estimate the heat transfer within the fuel regions for a legal weight truck cask. During this work, I was exposed to the various regulations governing the nuclear industry such as 10CFR 50, 71 and 72 and various other regulations providing a direct connection to industrial applications.

I am currently working as a Supervisor for ORANO TN which is a leading supplier of spent nuclear fuel packages. My work at UNR was directly applicable when I graduated and helped me land the Thermal Engineer position at ORANO TN (Formerly Transnuclear Inc.)

As a Mechanical Engineer, my primary interest is in the area of heat transfer and thermal performance. CFD simulations and utilizing advanced tools to provide high fidelity solutions is one of my current focus areas.

In my junior year of undergrad, I learned about the nuclear packaging work being done at the University of Nevada, Reno by my professor Dr. Mustafa Hadj-Nacer.... The research that I have conducted at UNR has provided a great jumping off point for tackling research at my employer Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Mitchell Lane

Hometown: Pleasant Hill, Calif.

Mitchell Lane

Alex Kramer

Carson City, Nev.

Person at test site with large fire and partition behind

I am Alex Kramer, Carson City High School graduate of 1992. I started the UNR Mechanical Engineering program in 1996. I had worked as a machinist for 3 years and earned an associate degree in Electronics Technology prior to attending UNR. While I was in my 3rd year at UNR, Dr. Greiner mentioned that he was looking for a student researcher. He noticed that I had done well in his ME 322 Instrumentation class, so he took a chance and offered me the job. It was a big change for me at the time because I was working part time at an automation company and supporting myself while taking a full load of classes.

I started doing thermal modeling of a nuclear waste transport container with Patran software on what was a pretty powerful workstation at the time. The designers of these containers have struggled to quantify the thermal response which the container experiences when there is a transportation accident involving a fire. So the Department of Energy had invested money to better understand the phenomena of heat transfer from large fires. Dr Suo-Anttila of Sandia National Labs was developing a fire heat transfer simulation program that could be integrated with the Patran thermal software, which simulated the container’s internal response to the heating. 

Person working on test site next to large pit and metal structure

My job was first to get the different software working together, and then to compare results to what was seen in earlier fire experiments. Of course, with any simulation software a lot of simplifying assumptions are made as well as assumptions of the boundary conditions of wind and turbulence at the boundary of the modeled space. So there was a lot of tweaking of the various model parameters and many simulations had to be run.  The results had to be compiled in a way that could be made sense of. I learned how to deal with large data sets and how to make plots which could be interpreted to improve the models.

Working on campus in the grad student office was a great change for me. It was so convenient to be able to work on any schedule and even between classes because Dr. Greiner didn’t care when the work was done. Also he always treated his researchers better than usual, both in terms of pay and we were allowed a lot of freedom in how things were done. There was always advice and help available when needed. I liked hanging out with the American and foreign grad students too.

Massive fire on test site

In 2000 I applied and was accepted to grad school at UNR and it was to be a continuation of the work I was doing as an undergrad. I was offered the opportunity to be a summer intern at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the specific task of constructing and performing a large-scale fire test on a mock-up of a nuclear waste container. I was to fully design the experiment and see it through to completion. It was a big challenge, but I was able to perform the fire tests two days before classes resumed in Reno, and we got useful data from it. The summer I spent at Sandia was the best of my life because there were lots of other interns and Sandia even had an employee that organized activities for us. I hiked the Grand Canyon, rafted the Rio Grande, and made some great friends that I still have 20 years later. It also paid pretty well.

I spent the next three semesters of graduate school analyzing the data from that fire experiment. We wrote a bunch of papers and traveled to New York City, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, and a few other places to present them at conferences. We had a papers published in the Journal of Heat transfer, Journal of Pressure Vessel and Piping, and others. I was earning a Master’s degree, traveling the US, and getting paid at the same time and it even covered tuition fees. How can you get a better deal than that?

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