Digital Twin Verification for Advanced Reactor Remote Operations

Advanced reactors, especially microreactors, must take advantage of remote monitoring and control strategies to reduce the commercial cost of deployment and operations costs to compete with existing electrical generators. A robust and flexible remote concept of operations must be developed to support diverse designs and use cases to ensure safe and reliable operations. This paper presents the unique aspects of remote operations as they contrast existing established operations to highlight issues that must be considered. A key element of the remote operations concept is the ability for a physically separated command and control center to maintain awareness of the reactor’s state and perform supervisory control on the reactor. A digital twin implementation is proposed to serve as a verification system, to provide the remote operations center with verified reactor state information and to provide the remotely situated reactor with verified operation center commands. This approach augments existing communication infrastructure to support operators as they assess the validity of the information they are receiving and confidence that the commands they issue can be executed at the remote reactor.