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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Copper melting behavior at extreme temperatures could inform fusion materials
Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced researchers have conducted experiments testing how copper melts under extreme conditions, such as those it might be exposed to in a fusion machine. The results, published in Nature Communications, found that a copper thin film was more resilient to melting than models had predicted, uncovering molecular dynamics that had been missing from calculations.
“These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers,” said Mianzhen Mo, the SLAC staff scientist who led the research.
Workshop
Thursday, April 4, 2024|8:00AM–12:00PM EDT|Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub Room 603
Session Organizers:
Carolina Dutra (Penn State University)
David Reger (Penn State University)
Want to learn more about the MOOSE Framework and how to use it? Join our PSU students and Dr. Joshua Hansel (INL) for this hands-on workshop which will introduce attendees to the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), an open-source finite element framework developed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for advanced computational modeling and simulation. The workshop is designed for those with no prior experience using MOOSE. Attendees should bring laptops with MOOSE pre-installed to follow along with hands-on exercises and examples. Installation instructions will be provided prior to the workshop. By the end, you will be able to create simple models with the classes available in MOOSE's library and have basic orientation on creating your own MOOSE-based applications.
Speaker
Joshua Hansel
Dr. Joshua Hansel is a computational scientist at Idaho National Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University with his Ph.D. research on stabilization techniques for solving hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations. Since beginning his career at INL, Dr. Hansel has worked on the systems code RELAP-7 and the MOOSE Thermal Hydraulics Module (THM). Currently, he is the lead developer of the MOOSE-based heat pipe application, Sockeye.
