Education

Earlier this year, Nuclear Waste Services, the radioactive waste management subsidiary of the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, hosted a group of five teenagers for a week of exposure to real-world work environments at its facilities in Calderbridge, Cumbria. The students learned about career opportunities and leadership responsibilities at the company while they engaged with senior management and performed activities with several NWS teams, including employees in the environmental, waste characterization, cybersecurity, human resources, and geological disposal facility grants departments.

Energy company Ansaldo Energia recently hosted a ceremony at its headquarters in Genoa, Italy, marking the launch of the Master in Technologies for Nuclear Power Plants program, which it developed in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano. A call for graduates in engineering, physics, and chemistry issued in May attracted more than 300 applications, 26 of which were selected for the program.

Kim

Recently, Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization Chair Seungjin Kim talked with Nuclear News about NEDHO’s current condition, governmental funding for NEDHO and university research, the impact of artificial intelligence and other technologies in the classroom, the influence of advanced reactors in nuclear engineering education, and other issues.

Kim, who is an ANS Fellow, is the Captain James F. McCarthy Jr. and Cheryl E. McCarthy Head of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind. He began his 2025–2026 term as NEDHO chair earlier this year. He took over from the previous chair, Sukesh Aghara, professor and director of the Nuclear and Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell.

The University of New Mexico School of Engineering held its first-ever nuclear engineering camp, Experience Nuclear Engineering 2025, a free program for high school students.

Applications are now open for the fall 2025 testing period for the American Nuclear Society’s Certified Nuclear Professional (CNP) exam. Applications are being accepted through October 14, and only three testing sessions are offered per year, so it is important to apply soon. The test will be administered from November 12 through December 16. To check eligibility and schedule your exam, click here.

In addition, taking place tomorrow (September 19) from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. (CDT), ANS will host a new webinar, “How to Become a Certified Nuclear Professional.” More information is available below in this article.

Nuclear Waste Services, the radioactive waste management subsidiary of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, has reported on its inaugural year of the National Youth Forum on Geological Disposal. NWS set up the initiative, in partnership with the environmental consultancy firm ARUP and the not-for-profit organization The Young Foundation, to give young people the chance to share their views on the government’s plans to develop a geological disposal facility (GDF) for the safe, secure, and long-term disposal of radioactive waste.

It’s almost been a full year since the American Nuclear Society held its inaugural section of Nuclear 101, a comprehensive certificate course on the basics of the nuclear field. Offered at the 2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo, that first sold-out course marked a massive milestone in the Society’s expanding work in professional development and certification.

Following official confirmation in June at the American Nuclear Society’s 2025 Annual Conference, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has kicked off its first year as the newest ANS student section.

Mike Harkin

When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.

The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.

We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.

The application period for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Program (MSCFP) has opened. Women interested in studying nuclear-related subjects at the master’s degree level should apply by October 31, 2025.

More information on how to apply can be found here.

Sukesh Aghara

In an era when affordable, clean energy is as much an economic imperative as it is an environmental one, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has an opportunity to lead not just through legislation but through partnership—between state leadership and its world-class universities.

Massachusetts has long led on decarbonization through electric vehicle adoption, rooftop solar, and offshore wind. We have reduced energy consumption through efficiency investments. From 2022 to 2024 alone, the state’s Mass Save programs facilitated energy savings equal to the annual usage of over 852,000 homes, avoided 684,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, and delivered $2.3 billion in customer incentives. But to meet growing demand and industrial needs, it’s time to invite universities to help craft a bolder vision—one that includes advanced nuclear technologies.

The Nuclear Company, which in April opened its primary engineering and construction office in Columbia, S.C., announced a partnership with the University of South Carolina’s Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing, whereby the company will invest up to $5 million in the college over five years. USC is to match the private investment with funds from federal grants, industry partners, and other donors.

A cohort of women working in the nuclear community visited Canada recently as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Lise Meitner Program (LMP) to boost their career development. During the third and final leg of the 2025 LMP, the women took part in two weeks of training focused on research reactors.

As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (P.E.) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall. Sign up now to enhance your studying with the help of the online module program from the American Nuclear Society.

The ninth International Mentoring Workshop in Japan was hosted recently by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in partnership with the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. Held at the Wakasa Bay Energy Research Centre (WERC) in Tsugura, Fukui Prefecture, the workshop brought together 26 Japanese female high school students to explore career options in STEM and nuclear energy fields.

When small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear plants someday provide electricity, hydrogen, desalination, and district heating, the North Carolina Collaboratory will deserve some credit. Headquartered at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the collaboratory is a research funding agency established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2016 to partner with academic institutions and government agencies. Its goal is to help transform research into practical applications for the benefit of North Carolina’s state and local economies. To that end, it engages in research projects related to advanced nuclear energy, among other initiatives.

Here’s an easy way to make aging U.S. power reactors look relatively youthful: Compare them (average age: 43) with the nation’s university research reactors. The 25 operating today have been licensed for an average of about 58 years.

Nearly 300 public school teachers, career counselors, and school administrators from 11 middle and high schools in the Oak Ridge region of Tennessee recently attended a nuclear opportunities workshop. The event was held to provide information about careers available for students in the years ahead related to the cleanup mission of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management.

When ABET visits universities for accreditation purposes, it’s crucial that a qualified nuclear expert performs the assessment of that school’s nuclear engineering, radiological engineering, and/or health physics programs. The Accreditation Policies and Procedures Committee (APPC) of the American Nuclear Society works to ensure that a program evaluator (PEV) from the Society leads these ABET assessments.