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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Latest News
Seven projects selected for DARPA’s Rads to Watts
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected seven teams for its Rads to Watts program, setting off a competition to design radiovoltaic cells capable of providing power in extreme environments such as deep sea and space.
The teams are now working on developing a unit cell, simple demonstrations that their design ideas work. These are expected to be low power but capable of being scaled up into a higher-power array.
Advanced Reactor Safety (ARS) SPeaker
Dr. Lester Towell is the Director of Operations at ACU’s NEXT Lab.
Dr. Towell earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from Abilene Christian University in 1990. For the next four years, he served in the US Navy as an instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, FL where he taught Reactor Principles and Physics. In 1995, Dr. Towell joined the Computer Information Systems department at Howard Payne University and moved to the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) Lab at ACU in 2020 as the licensing manager for the first university advanced reactor in the country.
Currently, Dr. Towell serves as the Director of Operations for the NEXT Lab at ACU which is designing the world’s first molten salt research reactor. The mission of the ACU NEXT Lab is to provide global solutions to the world’s critical need for energy, water, and medical isotopes by advancing the technology of molten salt reactors while educating future leaders in nuclear science and engineering.
Last modified April 3, 2024, 6:44am PDT
