Education and Training Series #22: ASTRID – LESSONS LEARNED
Part of a webinar series hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group since 2016.
Who should attend?
Policymakers, industry professionals, regulators, researchers, students, the general public.
About the "GIF Education and Training" Webinars
These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.
These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG).
About this Webinar
This presentation will first place the context of the choice of Sodium Fast Reactor in the French Nuclear Policy and its rationale for a closed fuel cycle. It will then present the position of the French Sodium Fast Reactor program in the context of Generation IV. The presentation will then focus on the ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) project. The technical achievements, major innovation progress and management challenges will be presented. The ASTRID project description will highlight the major use of digital tools (numerical simulation, use of virtual reality, multiscale and multi-physics modeling, PLM: Product Lifecycle Management) used to perform efficiently such a complex project.
Presentation made during the webinar
Meet the presenter
Mr. Gilles Rodriguez is a senior expert engineer at the CEA/CADARACHE (French Atomic Energy Commission/Cadarache center). Since 2016, he has also been the deputy head of the ASTRID Project team, working on Generation-IV Fast Reactor research program. He graduated from the university of Lyon, France in 1990 with an engineering degree in Chemistry and obtained a Master of Science in chemical and process engineering from the Polytechnic University of Toulouse, France, in 1991. His areas of expertise are fast reactor technology, liquid metal processes, and process engineering. From 2007 to 2013, he was Project Leader of sodium technology and components, within the CEA SFR project organization. In 2013, he joined the CEA project on Sodium Fast Reactor: ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration), first as responsible of the ASTRID Nuclear Island.