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Next generation nuclear energy technology is being developed both in the United States and internationally to help meet an increasing future energy demand. The principal focus in developing this clean, greenhouse-gas free energy source is on a few major issues: economics, waste management, sustainability, safety, proliferation resistance and physical protection (1, 2). The latter two clearly have urgent priorities for obvious reasons of global peace and security. At the same time, the immense power of modern computing combined with advances in modeling and simulation have made it very practical to tackle a wide variety of complex problems using ‘virtual engineering’. Virtual engineering is currently being applied with success in such diverse fields as architecture, aircraft design, computational fluid dynamics, shipbuilding, and even undersea weapons design (3), to name just a few. It is particularly well suited to solving complex, multi-functional engineering development problems where phenomenological interactions are particularly complicated, or where prototype construction and testing would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Obviously, this would be particularly true of a reprocessing plant for used nuclear fuel.