Atomic Show #335 – Dr. Hash Hashemian, President American Nuclear Society
Dr. Hash Hashemian has been an inspiring leader in the nuclear industry for half a century. He was recently inaugurated as the President of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) after serving for a year as the Vice President/President Elect.
His company, AMS Corporation, provides key services and products to nearly every nuclear power plant in the United States and a growing portion of those located outside of the United States. He founded AMS with a partner in 1977 and became the sole owner in 1986. Even though it is a relatively small company with an average head count of 100 people, AMS maintains a strong research and development organization. AMS employees, including Dr. Hashemian, have published hundreds of papers in academic journals and produced a significant body of original research.
Hash is a nuclear energy industry expert with an enormous breadth and depth of experience.
On this episode of the Atomic Show, we skimmed over a sampling of his knowledge of the industry. We talked about his visions and plans for the next year as the President of ANS, his view of the future of nuclear energy and our slightly differing views of the role that the government should play in getting a nuclear power plant building effort off of the ground.
We discussed Dr. Hashemian’s successful, inspiring effort to obtain not one, not two, but three PhD’s over a 10 year period while running a business and raising a family. Besides his incredible work ethic, he shared another tactic – he devoted the hours of 9:00 pm to 2:00 am to study each day during that decade.
Dr. Hashemian is a proud graduate of the University of Tennessee. His business is headquartered in Knoxville, not far from Oak Ridge. He is an active member of the East Tennessee nuclear industry, which currently includes 156 companies. We talked about Tennessee’s leadership within the industry, the investments that the state is making in maintaining its leadership and the special advantages of having Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12 and legacy defense-related nuclear sites that are being cleaned and leveled. These sites provide large tracts of land that are available to nuclear-focused companies at attractive prices.
Colleges and universities in East Tennessee, including the University of Tennessee, Tennessee Tech and Roane State Community College are academic assets that are training engineers and technicians in fields relevant to the nuclear industry.
Dr. Hashemian reminded us that states like Texas and Virginia are also racing to be nuclear industry leaders.
We took advantage of Dr. Hashemian’s special knowledge of nuclear power plant instrumentation and control systems to discuss the reasons why the U.S. nuclear power plant fleet almost exclusively still uses analog protection and alarm systems.
We talked about some of the changing I & C needs for advanced reactors and the usefulness of a wide variety of sizes and configurations for nuclear energy facilities. Dr. Hashemian is a believer in an “all of the nuclear plant sizes above” catalog.
Dr. Hashemian also shared his nuclear energy origin story. Like several other prominent nuclear industry leaders, he grew up in Iran during the period when it was still ruled by the Shah of Iran. Throughout almost all of the 1970s, the Shah was pursuing a plan to build 20 large nuclear power plants to provide electricity to his rapidly modernizing country.
That plan was openly aimed at reducing Iran’s domestic oil and gas consumption so that more of those valuable products could be exported into the world market.
Aside: As Atomic Insights has said many times, nuclear fission heat can replace other sources of thermal energy including oil, gas and coal. That gives those whose wealth and power is sourced from combustion fuels a powerful incentive to shape public and political attitudes about their most capable competitive technology. End Aside.
The Shah’s government supported thousands of students – including Hash Hashemian – in programs to study nuclear science and engineering and other related fields in some of the best universities in the world. The expectation was that those student would return to Iran and help develop the Shah’s expansive nuclear power program.
After the Shah was overthrown, some of the students returned to Iran, but many – like Dr. Hashemian – chose to remain in the United States and build their lives and careers here.
Those enterprising, hard-working immigrants – first generation Americans – continue to play an important role in nuclear energy development. The second generation is also contributing their skills, work ethic and intellect.
You’ll enjoy this show. We’re sure of it.
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I suspect Constellation is getting little out of Blue Wave AI… The solution biases in power distribution/margin and reactivity in these core simulator ‘codes’ are manifestations of modeling/method limitations made for run time (runs fast). The BWR operators are generally locked into using the fuel vendors’ licensed, design of record, core simulator to do the design and monitoring work. The dominant vendor’s core simulator uses very old diffusion methods that ‘run fast’ and have been ‘good enough’ for at least two decades. Biases could be reduced with better methods like those developed by Studsvik, but generally are accommodated by additional design margin fat [biasing low] with the ‘bad code’. So, Blue Wave seems to be making a science project analyzing/reconciling relatively ‘bad answers’ with instrumentation that until recently was considered ‘calibrated’ when within 10% of a reference power distribution reconstructed from periodic (40 day) movable detector traces using the ‘bad code’. Like you said it’s heady, technical stuff and way more down in the weeds than typical for your blog. FWIW, the fuel vendor has for decades been using an ‘AI’ written by our BWXT colleague William E. Russell (Prometheus) to balance all the different design constraints with a best solution. Still, designers find the program hard to constrain and generally just do the design work themselves. My coworkers and I earn our livings this way.
The New York State new build article would have had a lot of comments… My ask there would have been why build FOAK? I’d love to see little BWRs built, but think the ABWR or AP1000 would be better choices.
Revised:
WRT Blue Wave, the solution biases in core simulator ‘codes’ are manifestations of modeling/method limitations/compromises made for run time. Most BWR fleet operators are locked into using the fuel vendors’ licensed, design of record, core simulator to do the design, monitoring, and maneuvering work. The dominant vendor’s core simulator uses old diffusion methods that ‘run fast’ and have been ‘good enough’ for at least two decades. Biases could be reduced with better methods (COTS and in development), but are accommodated by additional design margin fat [biasing low]. Reload batch size is going to be what it’s going to be for a given cycle duration +/- 4 assemblies (~1%), with or without talent or AI; room for improvement is incremental at best.
Blue Wave seems to be analyzing/reconciling relatively ‘bad answers’ with instrumentation. The instrumentation is considered calibrated/operable when readings are within 10% of a reference power distribution, reconstructed (splined) from periodic (40 day) movable detector traces, *using* the ‘bad code’. As you wrote, it’s heady, technical stuff and way more down in the weeds than typical for your blog. FWIW, the fuel vendor has for decades been using an ‘AI’ written by a former colleague (Prometheus) to balance all the different design constraints with a best solution. Still, designers find the program hard to constrain and generally just do the design work themselves.