Introduction
The Generic Feasibility Assessment (GFA) tool is designed to help policy makers get a high-level overview of the benefits and drawbacks of the next generation of nuclear power system. The assessment allows for easy comparisons of future nuclear systems currently under development with existing standard nuclear technologies. This aims to inform decisions about which technologies to consider for future nuclear reactors. The tool was developed by researchers at the National Nuclear Laboratory, the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute and Integrated Decision Management Ltd.
In GFA, proposed nuclear power systems are assessed against a reference system, either a gigawatt-scale pressurised water reactor (PWR, such as Sizewell B; the most common reactor in operation around the world), or a small modular version of the same system (SMR; such as the Rolls Royce SMR which has just been selected to be built in the UK). The comparison is made using published, publicly available data.
GFA gives a hierarchical assessment of the benefit or challenge of the subject system, with a system being assessed on Strategic Attributes, which can then be broken down into more detailed Discriminators, which can themselves be further subdivided into more detailed Metrics. “Top Trumps for nuclear reactor systems” sums GFA up in a nutshell.
The Request
The GFAs have previously been done using large PowerPoint documents, which were becoming difficult to manage and keep updated, with the assessments weighing in at over 1500 slides.
The researchers approached the Research IT's Web Application Development Service (WADS) with the task to transform the GFA into a web application. The aim was to provide a good content management system to help with creating and managing assessments, as well as a visualisation for display of the assessment data to make the assessments more widely available and easier to use.
Lasse Schmieding and a Year In Industry student from the Research Software Engineering department built a web application based around the Wagtail Content Management System, providing a feature-rich administrator interface for entering GFA data.
To display the entered GFAs, the RSEs developed an interactive visualisation using D3.js to display the assessed scores. The visualisation allows users to interactively drill down into lower-level assessments that combined into the higher-level scores, providing a quick view of the decisions that influenced the higher-level score. The visualisation further provides quick links to pages which display the full reasoning for a particular score.
The web GFA tool also supports comparing two distinct subject systems, which were previously assessed against the same reference system. This allows for more dynamic comparisons, that were difficult to manage using the previous PowerPoint based system.
The Outcome
We are extremely happy with the GFA web application from WADS. The skill set of their RSEs has very little overlap with those of our research group, and because of this, one of the biggest challenges we faced was how to communicate effectively what was desired. Our original request is not what was eventually delivered against, as the RSEs were able to understand what was being asked and improve the request, and deliver a superior product as a result. The importance of this communication, alongside the technical expertise to actually deliver the project should not be underestimated.
The pre-existing data in the previous format of GFA has been converted successfully to a web application, with superior functionality for users. The next step for the researchers is to update the content to reflect the situation in 2025.
Get in Touch
This site is an example of many sites developed and supported by the Research IT’s WaDS Service (Wagtail and Django Stack), a full-stack and complete lifecycle option for research focused websites with bespoke requirements building upon a centrally hosted framework and content management system with custom components. If you’d like to discuss possible future collaborations including the development of a bespoke web application, please get in touch with Research IT.