The featured student this week is Jonathan Farmer, a Nuclear Engineering major from Tullahoma, Tennessee, who worked as a co-op student at Dominion in Richmond, Virginia.
In reporting on his rotation, Jonathan specifically worked in the Nuclear Analysis and Fuels department for Dominion Resources. The group he was in was called the Nuclear Core Design (NCD). NCD is in charge of monitoring all of Dominion’s nuclear reactors and most of the time is spent on analysis of data coming from the reactors to ensure that they are operating within NRC and Dominions guidelines.
In particular, Jonathan was responsible for the monthly reporting for the North Anna Power Plant reactors and Millstone Power Plant Unit 2. The monthly reporting consisted of running computer codes to simulate and analyze how the core had performed over the month, and then puts the results of that analysis into reports that could be shared with reactor engineering at the plant and could be used to prove to the NRC that they were operating within guidelines if required. This process took up the first two weeks of each month and then he would work with full time engineers with projects they were currently working on, such as pre-outage work and testing updates to computer codes.