DOE Selects GURU to Hyper-Enable Advanced Reactor Digital Engineering

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May 24, 2022, 03:11 ET

LOS ANGELES, May 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MSBAI has been awarded $199,944 by the Department of Energy to adapt their GURU Universal Interface for Simulation to challenges faced in advanced nuclear reactor digital engineering.

The MSBAI Team, at Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2021

The White House has called for 100% carbon pollution-free electricity use by 2030, but the schedule and cost to design and construct nuclear reactors presents a significant barrier with a lead time of 20-30 years and cost of $10-$15 billion. The new contract entitled "GURU: A Game Changer for American Leadership in Advanced Reactor Digital Engineering" (Solicitation: DE-FOA-0002555, FY 2022 SBIR/STTR Phase I Release 2) will address these barriers through digital engineering, reducing the time to set up simulations using the Office of Nuclear Energy's Advanced Modeling and Simulation tools down from hours to minutes.

"Supporting small businesses will ensure we are tapping into all of America's talent to develop clean energy technologies that will help us tackle the climate crisis," said Steve Binkley, Acting Director of the DOE's Office of Science. "DOE's investments will enable these economic engines to optimize and commercialize their breakthroughs, while developing the next generation of science leaders and ensuring U.S. scientific and economic competitiveness that will benefit all Americans."

GURU is a cognitive AI assistant that enables you to set up simulations in minutes — which represents a dramatic breakthrough when it comes to specialized simulation software such as those utilized in Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS). MSBAI will bring the game-changing advantage of GURU to Advanced Reactor digital engineering, focusing on non-Light Water Reactor designs (such as high temperature gas reactors, molten salt reactors, fast reactors, micro-reactors, and small modular reactors). GURU will be adapted to reduce the time and cost to design a nuclear reactor and improve outcomes, solving nuclear, civil, and systems analysis problems.

"We are thrilled to build on our long standing relationship with the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility where we have benefitted from access to leadership systems such as the Summit supercomputer," said Allan Grosvenor, MSBAI's CEO. "Under this contract to DOE, we will train GURU to autonomously perform virtual prototyping and simulation critical to the design of new advanced reactors."

More information about all the projects announced by DOE today is available at the following link: https://science.osti.gov/sbir

Contact:
Allan Grosvenor, CEO of MSBAI
[email protected]
310-954-2049