Neutronics Engineer

Thanks for your interest in Oklo!  We are searching for a Senior Neutronics Engineer to join our engineering team.

Position Description

The Senior Neutronics Engineer is responsible for developing and executing neutronics analyses supporting the design, optimization, operation, and safety evaluation of an isotope production reactor. The engineer will perform analyses to support core design, fuel cycle, target performance, shielding, and sensitivity/uncertainty quantification across the reactor lifecycle and isotope production facility.

This role requires close collaboration with thermal hydraulics, mechanical design, materials, isotope processing, operations, safety, and licensing teams. The engineer will translate system and production objectives into analysis requirements; develop appropriate computational models and methods; and produce technically sound, traceable, and defensible results. Areas of analysis include criticality, depletion, isotope production, target optimization, shielding, activation, source term, and sensitivity/uncertainty analysis.

The isotope division is a small but growing team so the candidate must be capable of operating in a highly iterative and independent environment.

Specific responsibilities may include:

• Perform reactor core design and optimization using Monte Carlo and, where appropriate, deterministic neutron transport methods.

• Develop and execute models using codes such as MCNP, Serpent, and SCALE

• Perform core lifecycle and fuel management analyses, including depletion, burnup, reactivity evolution, power distributions, fuel utilization, and operating cycle optimization.

• Evaluate core physics parameters, including excess reactivity, control element worth, shutdown margin, reactivity coefficients, kinetics parameters, and criticality safety margins.

• Design and optimize irradiation targets to meet isotope yield, specific activity, radionuclidic purity, heat limits, and production schedule objectives.

• Perform depletion, activation, decay, and transmutation analyses for fuel, targets, structural materials, experimental hardware, and reactor components.

• Develop neutron and photon source terms for shielding, activation, decay heat, dose, and isotope processing evaluations.

• Perform shielding analyses using variance reduction techniques.

• Apply sensitivity and uncertainty methods using tools such as TSUNAMI and SAMPLER to quantify nuclear data, modeling, and manufacturing uncertainties.