Working to automate nuclear plant operations
PhD student Lauren Fortier is building on the experience she gained operating a nuclear plant for the Navy to solve a critical hurdle in the wider adoption of the energy source.
Nuclear power plants' operations are often manually intensive, but Lauren Fortier, a doctoral student in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, is working on making them more autonomous. Fortier, who previously served as a naval nuclear operator on a U.S. aircraft carrier, noticed the need for more efficient processes during her time in the Navy.
After completing her master's degree, she focused her research on supervisory control systems for nuclear plants, with the goal of developing an integrated approach to autonomous operations. The key challenge is to create a control system that can effectively accommodate both human and machine involvement. Fortier has collaborated with researchers at MIT and the Idaho National Laboratory, as well as with Westinghouse, to test her ideas and develop a human-machine interface for autonomous operations.
She believes that a gradual and systematic move toward automation will build trust in the system, making it a viable solution for small, rural nuclear plants in the future.
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