From The DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory : “Lab program offers free expertise to Idaho Falls Power”

From The DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory

6.10.24
Paul Menser

Shafiul Alam, an INL power and energy systems researcher, helped Idaho Falls Power assess their utility assets to better plan for the future and serve their customers.

Utilities with hydroelectric power generation need solid data for day-to-day operations and long-term planning.

So, when managers at Idaho Falls Power wanted to explore the potential of their power generation assets, they turned to Idaho National Laboratory for help. Because of location, the pairing is a natural one. Idaho Falls Power, an electrical utility owned by the city of Idaho Falls, operates five run-of-river hydropower dams and turbines that date back to the early 20th century. The dams supply roughly 28.5% of the city’s annual energy demand. INL is headquartered in Idaho Falls, and the city’s electrical infrastructure provides a backyard test bed for the grid resilience research it does for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The lab’s Technical Assistance Program (TAP) provides 40 hours of INL expertise free to qualifying businesses and organizations. Through TAP, INL researchers prepared two reports that quantify the dams’ seasonal capacities for islanding and black starting, providing details on critical loads that can be supported in emergencies at different times of the year. Black starting involves jump-starting a local grid with equipment and electricity that’s immediately available, while islanding involves powering the local grid independent of the larger regional grid. The reports could help Idaho Falls Power as it applies for grid resilience grants available from DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, which is administering $10.5 billion to improve the electric grid’s ability to withstand extreme weather.

Idaho Falls Power operates five run-of-the-river dams along the Snake River. The assessment done by INL’s Shafiul Alam and Ryan Hruska will help them better serve their 60,000 plus residential and commercial customers.

“To have that outside perspective is very helpful,” said Stephen Boorman, Idaho Falls Power’s assistant general manager. The utility’s latest GRIP grant application seeks funds to automate power distribution and equipment needed to sectionalize its system. That equipment could include batteries, new transmission lines and a substation on Idaho Falls’ north side, near INL’s Research and Education campus.

INL and I.F. Power have worked together since an outage in early December 2013 left city residents without electricity for roughly three hours in subzero cold. The outage occurred after the balancing authority that manages eastern Idaho’s electrical grid ordered the city to shed 35 megawatts of load in 30 minutes. This was to avoid an even more widespread outage, as Rocky Mountain Power worked to restore its Goshen substation, which had gone dark earlier in the day. The incident drove home the interconnectedness of grid providers.

Through TAP, INL researchers prepared two reports that quantify the dams’ seasonal capacities for islanding and black starting, providing details on critical loads that can be supported in emergencies at different times of the year.

In the wake of the outage, I.F. Power’s directors asked INL to help them determine how to adapt the city’s hydro dams so they could quickly use islanding and black starting to bring electricity back to the grid for hospitals and emergency service providers without disrupting the surrounding area.

Because they take time to ramp up, dams and turbines need an external boost to quickly dispatch electricity to the grid. Typically, that boost comes from batteries, supercapacitors or flywheels. A series of tests conducted by INL and Idaho Falls Power in April 2021 showed that innovative controls, configuring load from different facilities and integrated energy storage technologies can keep the lights on locally regardless of what’s happening to the regional grid.

Idaho Falls’ appetite for electricity has been growing, especially in the winter months, said Shafiul Alam, an INL power and energy systems researcher who prepared one of the TAP reports. But run-of-river power facilities depend on how much water is flowing in the river and, in eastern Idaho, there is typically more water in the river during the spring and summer. Solar and wind power contribute, but also tend to tail off in the winter.

Alam’s report on the hydropower portfolio indicates that with a successful black start of its entire hydro fleet, Idaho Falls Power can support up to 8.5 megawatts between November and February, 20 megawatts in June and July, and 16 megawatts in August and early September. These are peak months, when demand is highest — from irrigation and air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter — and generation is lowest. March, April, May, late September and October are times when hydropower generation is moderate to abundant and loads are milder.

“With energy storage support to the islanded hydro fleet, I.F. Power can currently form a microgrid at the expense of a significant amount of manual switching,” Alam said.

The other document, a resilience assessment completed by INL researcher Ryan Hruska, focused on characterizing the system’s exposure to wider hazards, including interdependencies. With its run-of-river facilities, which are incapable of storing much water, Idaho Falls Power is vulnerable.

“Power production is entirely dependent on the existing flow volumes and makes generation vulnerable to drought and upstream water diversions,” the report said. “Long-term drought conditions, compounded by effects of climate change, have the potential to significantly reduce and alter timing of flows. Recent droughts have depleted storage reservoirs across the West, and higher temperatures have altered both the amount and timing of inflows. The primary reservoirs above Idaho Falls are Jackson Lake and Palisades reservoirs. Both reached historic lows in 2022.”

Idaho Falls Power and its customers, who have traditionally enjoyed some of the lowest power rates in the United States, also face some uncertainty from the Bonneville Power Administration. In 2022, the administration proposed changes to their long-term hydro generation forecast due to observed changes in streamflow timing and volume. Likewise, the Western Area Power Administration significantly increased rates in 2022 due to the reduction in generation at their hydropower facilities. “These changes have the potential to impact the availability and cost of power for Idaho Falls Power,” the report said.

Because winter load is growing and Idaho Falls Power’s dependence on imported power is most acute at the same time, INL’s resilience assessment outlined the following options:

-Consider working with external transmission partners (like Rocky Mountain Power) to build redundancy into their high voltage delivery locations.
-Consider developing microgrids to support critical loads in case of a long-term power disruption impacting the region.
-Evaluate increased integration of distributed energy resources (smaller generation units located on the consumer’s side of the meter, e.g. solar panels) and evaluate circuit adequacy for deployments.
-Evaluate the potential to diversify their generation portfolio.
-Evaluate substation protection measures.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

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The DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory is one of the national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy and is managed by the Battelle Energy Alliance. While the laboratory does other research, historically it has been involved with nuclear research. Much of current knowledge about how nuclear reactors behave and misbehave was discovered at what is now Idaho National Laboratory. John Grossenbacher, former INL director, said, “The history of nuclear energy for peaceful application has principally been written in Idaho”.

Various organizations have built more than 50 reactors at what is commonly called “the Site”, including the ones that gave the world its first usable amount of electricity from nuclear power and the power plant for the world’s first nuclear submarine. Although many are now decommissioned, these facilities are the largest concentration of reactors in the world.

It is on a 890-square-mile (2,310 km^2) complex in the high desert of eastern Idaho, between Arco to the west and Idaho Falls and Blackfoot to the east. Atomic City, Idaho is just south. The laboratory employs approximately 4,000 people.

What is now the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory in southeastern Idaho began its life as a U.S. government artillery test range in the 1940s. Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military needed a safe location for performing maintenance on the Navy’s most powerful turreted guns. The guns were brought in via rail to near Pocatello, Idaho, to be re-sleeved, rifled and tested. As the Navy began to focus on post-World War II and Cold War threats, the types of projects worked on in the Idaho desert changed, too. Perhaps the most well-known was the building of the prototype reactor for the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus.

In 1949, the federal research facility was established as the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS). In 1975, the United States Atomic Energy Commission was divided into the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Idaho site was for a short time named ERDA and then subsequently renamed the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in 1977 with the creation of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under President Jimmy Carter. After two decades as INEL, the name was changed again to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) in 1997. Throughout its lifetime, there have been more than 50 one-of-a-kind nuclear reactors built by various organizations at the facility for testing; all but three are out of service.

On February 1, 2005, Battelle Energy Alliance took over operation of the lab from Bechtel, merged with The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory-West, and the facility name was changed to “Idaho National Laboratory”. At this time the site’s clean-up activities were moved to a separate contract, the Idaho Cleanup Project, which is currently managed by Fluor Idaho, LLC. Research activities were consolidated in the newly named Idaho National Laboratory.

According to AP news reports in April 2018, a single barrel of “radioactive sludge” ruptured while being prepared for transport to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southeast New Mexico for permanent storage. The 55-gallon barrel that ruptured is part of the badly-documented radioactive waste from the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver; it is unknown how many such barrels are stored at Idaho National Laboratory, nor what each barrel contains.

Research

Nuclear Energy Projects

Next Generation Nuclear Plant

One part of this program to develop improved nuclear power plants is the “Next Generation Nuclear Plant” or NGNP, which would be the demonstration of a new way to use nuclear energy for more than electricity. The heat generated from nuclear fission in the plant could provide process heat for hydrogen production and other industrial purposes, while also generating electricity. And the NGNP would use a high-temperature gas reactor, which would have redundant safety systems that rely on natural physical processes more than human or mechanical intervention.

INL worked with private industry to develop the NGNP between 2005 and 2011. It was commissioned to lead this effort by the United States Department of Energy as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Since 2011, the project has languished and funding for it ceased. The design for this reactor is currently owned by Framatome.

Fuel Cycle Research & Development

The Fuel Cycle Research & Development program aims to help expand nuclear energy’s benefits by addressing some of the issues inherent to the current life cycle of nuclear reactor fuel in the United States. These efforts strive to make nuclear energy’s expansion safe, secure, economic and sustainable.

Currently, the United States, like many other countries, employs an “open-ended” nuclear fuel cycle, whereby nuclear power plant fuel is used only once and then placed in a repository for indefinite storage. One of the primary FCRD goals is to research, develop and demonstrate ways to “close” the fuel cycle so fuel is reused or recycled rather than being shelved before all of its energy has been used. INL coordinates many of the FCRD’s national research efforts, including:

Continuing critical fuel cycle research and development (R&D) activities
Pursuing the development of policy and regulatory framework to support fuel cycle closure
Developing deployable technologies
Establishing advanced modeling and simulation program elements
Implementing a science-based R&D program

Light Water Reactor Sustainability program

The Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program supports national efforts to do the research and gather the information necessary to demonstrate whether it is safe and prudent to apply for extensions beyond 60 years of operating life.

The Program aims to safely and economically extend the service lives of the more than 100 electricity-generating nuclear power plants in the United States. The program brings together technical information, performs important research and organizes data to be used in license-extension applications.

Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility

INL’s Advanced Test Reactor is a research reactor located approximately 50 miles (80 km) from Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The Department of Energy named Advanced Test Reactor a National Scientific User Facility in April 2007. This designation opened the facility to use by university-led scientific research groups and gives them free access to the ATR and other resources at INL and partner facilities. In addition to a rolling proposal solicitation with two closing dates each year, INL holds an annual “Users Week” and summer session to familiarize researchers with the user facility capabilities available to them.

Nuclear Energy University Programs

DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Programs provide funding for university research grants, fellowships, scholarships and infrastructure upgrades.

For example, in May 2010, the program awarded $38 million for 42 university-led R&D projects at 23 United States universities in 17 states. In FY 2009, the program awarded about $44 million to 71 R&D projects and more than $6 million in infrastructure grants to 30 U.S. universities and colleges in 23 states. INL’s Center for Advanced Energy Studies administers the program for DOE. CAES is a collaboration between INL and Idaho’s three public research universities: The Idaho State University, Boise State University and The University of Idaho.

Multiphysics Methods Group

The Multiphysics Methods Group (MMG) is a program at Idaho National Laboratory (under the United States Department of Energy) begun in 2004. It uses applications based on the multiphysics and modeling framework MOOSE to simulate complex physical and chemical reactions inside nuclear reactors. The ultimate goal of the program is to use these simulation tools to enable more efficient use of nuclear fuel, resulting in lower electricity costs and less waste products.

The MMG focuses on problems within nuclear reactors related to its fuel and how heat is transferred inside the reactor. “Fuel degradation” refers to how uranium pellets and the rods they are encased in (several rods bundled together is what makes a “fuel assembly”) eventually wear out over time due to high heat and irradiation inside a reactor. The group states three main objectives: “The mission of the MMG is to support the INL goal to advance the U.S. nuclear energy endeavor by:

Furthering the state of computational nuclear engineering
Developing a robust technical basis in multidimensional multiphysics analysis methods
Developing the next generation of reactor simulation codes and tools”

The work done by the group directly supports programs such as the Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program’s research into advanced nuclear fuels.

National and Homeland Security

INL’s National and Homeland Security division focuses on two main areas: protecting critical infrastructures such as electricity transmission lines, utilities and wireless communications networks, and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Control systems cybersecurity

For nearly a decade, INL has been conducting vulnerability assessments and developing technology to increase infrastructure resilience. With a strong emphasis on industry collaboration and partnership, INL is enhancing electric grid reliability, control systems cybersecurity and physical security systems.

INL conducts advanced cyber training and oversees simulated competitive exercises for national and international customers. The lab supports cyber security and control systems programs for the departments of Homeland Security, Energy and Defense. INL staff members are frequently asked to provide guidance and leadership to standards organizations, regulatory agencies and national policy committees.

In January 2011, it was reported by The New York Times that the INL was allegedly responsible for some of the initial research behind the Stuxnet virus, which allegedly crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. The INL, which teamed up with Siemens, conducted research on the P.C.S.-7 control system to identify its vulnerabilities. According to the Times, that information would later be used by the American and Israeli governments to create the Stuxnet virus.

The Times article was later disputed by other journalists, including Forbes blogger Jeffrey Carr, as being both sensational and lacking verifiable facts. In March 2011, Vanity Fair’s magazine cover story on Stuxnet carried INL’s official response, stating, “Idaho National Laboratory was not involved in the creation of the Stuxnet worm. In fact, our focus is to protect and defend control systems and critical infrastructures from cyber threats like Stuxnet and we are all well recognized for these efforts. We value the relationships that we have formed within the control systems industry and in no way would risk these partnerships by divulging confidential information.”
Nuclear nonproliferation

Building on INL’s nuclear mission and legacy in reactor design and operations, the lab’s engineers are developing technology, shaping policy and leading initiatives to secure the nuclear fuel cycle and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Under the direction of the National Nuclear Security Administration, INL and other national laboratory scientists are leading a global initiative to secure foreign stockpiles of fresh and spent highly enriched uranium and return it to secure storage for processing. Other engineers are working to convert U.S. research reactors and build new reactor fuels that replace highly enriched uranium with a safer, low-enriched uranium fuel. To protect against threats from the dispersal of nuclear and radiological devices, INL researchers also examine radiological materials to understand their origin and potential uses. Others have applied their knowledge to the development of detection technologies that scan and monitor containers for nuclear materials.

The laboratory’s expansive desert location, nuclear facilities and wide range of source materials provide an ideal training location for military responders, law enforcement and other civilian first responders. INL routinely supports these organizations by leading classroom training, conducting field exercises and assisting in technology assessments.

Energy and environmental projects

Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity

INL’s Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity gathers information from more than 4000 plug-in-hybrid vehicles. These vehicles, operated by a wide swath of companies, local and state governments, advocacy groups, and others are located all across the United States, Canada and Finland. Together, they’ve logged a combined 1.5 million miles worth of data that are analyzed by specialists at INL.

Dozens of other types of vehicles, like hydrogen-fueled and pure electric cars, are also tested at INL. This data will help evaluate the performance and other factors that will be critical to widespread adoption of plug-in or other alternative vehicles.

Bioenergy

INL researchers are partnering with farmers, agricultural equipment manufacturers and universities to optimize the logistics of an industrial-scale biofuel economy. Agricultural waste products — such as wheat straw; corncobs, stalks or leaves; or bioenergy crops such as switchgrass or miscanthus — could be used to create cellulosic biofuels. INL researchers are working to determine the most economic and sustainable ways to get biofuel raw materials from fields to biorefineries.

Robotics

INL’s robotics program researches, builds, tests and refines robots that, among other things, clean up dangerous wastes, measure radiation, scout drug-smuggling tunnels, aid search-and-rescue operations, and help protect the environment.

These robots roll, crawl, fly, and go under water, even in swarms that communicate with each other on the go to do their jobs.

Biological Systems

The Biological Systems department is housed in 15 laboratories with a total of 12,000 square feet (1,100 m^2) at the INL Research Center in Idaho Falls. The department engages in a wide variety of biological studies, including studying bacteria and other microbes that live in extreme conditions such as the extremely high temperature pools of Yellowstone National Park. These types of organisms could boost the efficiency of biofuels production. Other studies related to uncommon microbes have potential in areas such as carbon dioxide sequestration and groundwater cleanup.

Hybrid energy systems

INL is pioneering the research and testing associated with hybrid energy systems that combine multiple energy sources for optimum carbon management and energy production. For example, a nuclear reactor could provide electricity when certain renewable resources aren’t available, while also providing a carbon-free source of heat and hydrogen that could be used, for example, to make liquid transportation fuels from coal.

Nuclear waste processing

In mid-2014, construction of a new liquid waste processing facility, the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, was nearing completion at INTEC on the INL site. It will process approximately 900,000 gallons of liquid nuclear waste using a steam reforming process to produce a granular product suitable for disposal. The facility is the first of its kind and based on a scaled prototype. The project is a part of the Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project aimed at removing waste and demolishing old nuclear facilities at the INL site.

Safety and Tritium Applied Research

In May 2022, CNBC reported the Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) program has been set up to looking into the production and safety protocols for working with tritium, the fuel that many startups are working on to commercialize fusion power.

Interdisciplinary projects

The Instrumentation, Control and Intelligent Systems (ICIS) Distinctive Signature supports mission-related research and development in key capability areas: safeguards and control system security, sensor technologies, intelligent automation, human systems integration, and robotics and intelligent systems. These five key areas support the INL mission to “ensure the nation’s energy security with safe, competitive, and sustainable energy systems and unique national and homeland security.”[citation needed] Through its grand challenge in resilient control systems, ICIS research is providing a holistic approach to aspects of design that have often been bolt-on, including human systems, security and modeling of complex interdependency.