Education

ANS President Lisa Marshall recently sat down with Phil Zeringue, vice president of strategic partnerships at Nuclearn.ai to talk about the evolving state of education in the nuclear world.

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar laid the basic groundwork in understanding radiation and the risks it presents. Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and joint faculty member at Savannah River National Laboratory, presented “Radiological Risk in Perspective,” the latest online event in ANS’s Educator Training offerings.

The University of Missouri announced today that it has signed a $10 million contract for the initial design phase of the $1 billion-plus state-of-the-art NextGen MURR research reactor project.

Plans to bring a university research reactor like no other to the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were punctuated last fall by the news that Ultra Safe Nuclear, the developer of the gas-cooled reactor technology selected for the Illinois Microreactor Project, had declared bankruptcy.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has posted a list of the advantages and challenges of using nuclear energy to power AI data centers, which some estimates suggest could consume as much as 12 percent of U.S. energy production by 2028. The DOE also posted a brief video on its YouTube channel to accompany the list.

The American Nuclear Society launched its inaugural Nuclear 101 certificate course at the 2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo in November. The five-day program, which is designed to provide participants with a robust understanding of nuclear energy and engineering, was the talk of the conference, with nearly 50 attendees from different nuclear organizations participating in the course.

For many of us, the height of our accomplishments with Lego blocks might have been constructing little square houses as children. For others, these versatile building blocks are a medium for creating complex models of sophisticated machinery—models that have practical and educational applications. One such individual is ANS member Vincent Lamirand, a reactor physicist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behavior (LRS) in Switzerland.

Nuclear Waste Services recently hosted a group of five teenagers for a week of exposure to real-world nuclear industry work environments at its facilities in Calderbridge, Cumbria, in northwestern England. The youth learned about career opportunities and leadership responsibilities at the company. They engaged with senior management and performed activities with several different NWS teams, including the environmental, waste characterization, cybersecurity, geological disposal facility grants, and human resources departments.

The opening of an Energy Exploration (E2) Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., was announced by NuScale Power Corporation on March 24. The training center will provide students from RPI’s School of Engineering an opportunity to gain a firsthand understanding of advanced nuclear technology and the role it will play in the global energy transition, as well as of the features and functionality of NuScale’s small modular reactor technology.

Learn more about NuScale E2 Centers here.

A group of students recently visited the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., to get a close look at L Area, a facility the DOE considers critical to nuclear materials management and nonproliferation missions at the site.

The Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) has provided funding to 15 classrooms in southeastern Idaho to support local educators and encourage the next generation of workers to pursue technical careers, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced. The IEC, which is led by Amentum and includes North Wind Portage as a partner, was awarded a 10-year, $6.4 billion contract in 2021 to manage cleanup operation at the Idaho National Laboratory Site.

Lisa Marshall
president@ans.org

This year's ANS Conference on Nuclear Training and Education (CONTE), held in early February, tackled emerging approaches to nuclear skills and the workforce. How do we attract, retain, and qualify our future professionals? What technologies will enhance teaching and assessment methods?

In 2024, the Department of Energy called the following developments “wins for nuclear energy”:

• Vogtle-4 had its commercial start.
• The ADVANCE Act to accelerate deployment of advanced reactors.
• Reactor recommissioning announcements and collaborations with tech companies.
• Growing our domestic nuclear fuel supply chain and expanding domestic capacity by 200 GW.
• Demonstration projects such as Natrium, Project Pele, and Hermes.

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (PE) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall, and now is the time to sign up and begin studying with the help of materials like the online module program offered by the American Nuclear Society.

A former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy recently appeared on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk YouTube show to discuss the future of nuclear energy in the United States and abroad.

North Carolina State University and the Electric Power Research Institute have been awarded a $500,000 grant by the NC Collaboratory for “An Assessment to Define Advanced Reactor Workforce Needs,” a project that aims to investigate job needs to help enable new nuclear development and deployment in North Carolina and surrounding areas. 

Muhammad Rafiul Abdussami is hoping to “shape a brighter future” through innovative approaches to nuclear engineering. The young native of Bangladesh, who is known to friends and colleagues as Rafiul, is a doctoral student in his third year in the University of Michigan’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (UMich NERS). He expects to graduate in December 2026. He is also enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) graduate certificate program in the UMich Ford School of Public Policy.

The North Carolina Collaboratory, a research funding agency established by the North Carolina General Assembly to partner with academic institutions and government entities, has awarded a grant to North Carolina State University and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) for research into small modular reactors. The funded research project, “Academic Boiling Water–Small Modular Reactor (BW-SMR) Simulator for Research, Development, and Educational Purposes,” focuses on the development of a digital-based simulator for GEH’s BWRX-300, a Gen III+ light water SMR.

The Hill recently published an opinion piece by Cindy Folkers and Amanda Nichols entitled “They won’t tell you these truths about nuclear energy.” Sadly, after the first sentence, their so-called truth veers into a diatribe of antiscientific fearmongering and misrepresentations.

WM Symposia (WM), which hosts the Waste Management Conference every year in Phoenix, Ariz., has launched a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) Educators’ Council to support educators as they prepare students for potential careers in the nuclear industry.

The Roy G. Post Foundation announced on February 6 that a total of $310,000 in scholarships will be awarded this year to college students in recognition of their academic achievements, leadership qualities, and positive impacts on their communities.