| Fission Systems and Radiation Transport Research |
Fission Option
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Fission Systems and Radiation Transport
The electric power generation industry is a major contributor to our quality of life in the United States. Almost 20% of this industry's output is from nuclear-electric generating stations. This source of electric power is currently one of the least expensive means of generating base-line electric power.
By virtue of the small volume and solid form of their waste product, nuclear power plants produce electricity with only a tiny environmental impact when compared to the endless airborne and massive solid waste released from coal fired and other fossil fuel power plants. Unlike hydrocarbon wastes, which last forever, nuclear wastes spontaneously convert themselves into non-radioactive forms, so that within a few hundred years of their creation nuclear wastes are less radioactive than was the natural uranium ore from which they were created.
Nuclear engineers are actively involved in the day-to-day operations of nuclear power plants. They plan and design refueling operations and also design the fuel to be installed, optimizing it for maximum energy delivery over its several years of useful life. These activities involve engineers at the utility, as well as the work of hundreds of engineers at consulting firms and reactor fuel design and manufacturing companies such as Westinghouse, General Electric, and Babcock & Wilcox. Nuclear engineers are also engaged in the design and construction of third generation nuclear power stations in Asia, and are considering conceptual designs for fourth generation plants for deployment in the United States and throughout the world.
Our undergraduate program in nuclear engineering has been educating the very best of these engineers since 1965.
Radiation Transport and Fission Systems Engineering encompasses the broad scientific fields relevant to the application of the fission process in the production of energy and to the study and application of radiation interactions and radiation transport through matter. Included are the areas of nuclear reactor theory such as neutron transport, thermal hydraulics, fuel cycle analysis, reactor kinetics, diagnostics, control, and optimization. Significant effort is devoted to computational simulations of these processes, and to applications of these simulations in overlapping areas, such as radiation protection, radiation cancer therapy, radiation-hydrodynamics, kinetic theory, and general computational physics.
Fission Faculty:
William R. Martin, James P. Holloway, Edward Larsen, John C. Lee, Alex Bielajew
