Development of ARKADIA for the Innovation of Advanced Nuclear Reactor Design Process

Japan Atomic Energy Agency is developing an innovative design system named ARKADIA to achieve the design of an advanced nuclear reactor as a safe, economic, and sustainable carbon-free energy source. ARKADIA consists of three systems: the Enhanced and AI-aided optimization System (EAS), the Virtual plant Life System (VLS), and the Knowledge Management System (KMS). In the first phase of its development, ARKADIA-Design for design study and ARKADIA-Safety for safety assessment are being developed individually. In this paper, focusing on the ARKADIA-Design, the progress in the development of optimization processes in the fields of the core design, the plant structure design, and the maintenance schedule planning are introduced. Design optimization is actualized using the modules for evaluation in the EAS, numerical analysis in the VLS, and knowledge base in the KMS. After setting design parameters, objective function and its elements, and constraints, necessary numerical analyses for the plant performance evaluation are performed in the VLS, and specific plant parameters regarding objective function are checked and modified to close to the optimized ones. The outlines of the optimization process on a representative problem are described in the fields.