Education

Abilene Christian University’s Gayle and Max Dillard Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC) has opened. SERC contains the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Laboratory (NEXT Lab) and is the future home of one of the first advanced reactors in the United States. More than 300 people were on hand to celebrate the opening and tour the facility, including donors, government officials, and scientists from ACU and other research institutions.

Harris

Abram

Cleo Abram and Johnny Harris are young, independent video journalists—and friends and colleagues—who have been posting educational and supportive videos about nuclear energy on YouTube.

Abram describes her work as “making optimistic tech explainers.” The name of her show is Huge If True, “an antidote to the doom and gloom, helping its audience decode the world around them and see positive futures they can help build.”

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (P.E.) licensure in nuclear engineering will be this fall when the exam is administered nationwide on October 24, 2023. If you haven't yet done so, you can brush up for the exam by obtaining the various preparation materials made available by the American Nuclear Society.

According to Joshua Vajda, chair of the ANS Professional Engineering Examination Committee (PEEC), it is important for ANS as a scientific society to continue to encourage professional licensure: “Emphasizing the importance of obtaining nuclear credentials is a Society initiative to maintain high ethical standards in the industry and to provide career advancement for the next generation of young practicing nuclear engineers.”

On April 10, the University of Missouri (MU) took its first formal step toward building NextGen MURR when school officials issued the request for qualifications for the project. The RFQ is a solicitation for interested companies to offer the design, engineering, licensing, environmental, and developmental services that are needed for NextGen MURR, planned to be larger and more capable than the school’s existing University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR)—which itself has been the most powerful research reactor and most intense neutron source on any U.S. campus since it began operating in 1966.

Helling

Terry

The relatively young pedagogical field of mind, brain, and education (MBE) is being increasingly applied to training programs in the nuclear industry. Last month, this column highlighted how the MBE approach is being used at the Beaver Valley nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pa. (“Neuroscience meets nuclear science at Beaver Valley,” NN, June 2023, p. 80). This month, the focus is on the MBE efforts of Pittsburgh-­based Westinghouse Electric Company, led by Westinghouse employees Pamela Terry, business and staff development lead, and Dave Helling, senior training advisor.

Helling was one of four panelists (along with Beaver Valley’s instructional technologist Annaliese Piraino) who participated in a discussion at the Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2023) earlier this year. There, he summarized his two conference presentations and discussed aspects of his company’s psychology-­ and neuroscience-­based approach to training and education.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Clean Air Task Force are offering a three-day course “Nuclear Energy in a Low-Carbon Future: Key Facts and Issues” on August 1–3. The course is organized by MIT’s Jacopo Buongiorno, Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering and director of science and technology for the university’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory.

The daily schedule runs from 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (Eastern) on the first two days and 9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. on the third day.

The in-person version of the course is fully booked, but slots for remote attendance are still available—at no cost. Registration is required by completing a registration form.

The American Nuclear Society is collaborating with the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership (KFP) at North Carolina State University to introduce a nuclear science curriculum to Kenan Fellows and the K-12 students they teach.

The education and training of the nuclear power plant workforce is advancing in ways that are increasingly based on scientific knowledge about how the brain works. At the Beaver Valley nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pa., instructional technologist and certified nuclear instructor Annaliese B. Piraino is applying the principles of educational psychology and neuroscience to the instructional practices.

The plant, which Texas-based Vistra Corporation acquired recently from Energy Harbor, consists of two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, each with a production capacity just over 930 MWe. The operators along with the maintenance and technical staff at Beaver Valley are beginning to show the benefits of the new neuroscience-based instructional approaches to training that are being implemented by Piraino and the Beaver Valley training department.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy on June 21 announced just over $6.3 million in funding for 18 projects at 15 universities in 14 states. The funding builds up scientific infrastructure and upgrades research reactors at universities to expand the nation’s scientific capabilities and train the next generation of nuclear energy scientists and engineers.

This year, the American Nuclear Society Scholarship Policy and Coordination Committee, the ANS divisions, and the ANS local sections have awarded 96 scholarships for the 2023–24 academic year totaling $259,600 of support for students pursuing degrees in nuclear science and technology.

The latest National Nuclear Energy Public Opinion Survey by Bisconti Research, conducted from April 28 to May 5, indicated little awareness of small modular reactors (SMRs). Of 1,000 adults in the United States who were surveyed, only about 20 percent answered “yes” to the question “Have you heard anything about advanced-design nuclear power plants called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)?” Sixty-seven percent answered “no,” and 14 percent responded “not sure.”

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

In his new film Nuclear Now, Oliver Stone brings his seasoned directorial hand to bear on the modern case for nuclear energy. Of course, all of us in the field are suckers for a good nuclear movie. (Triple feature with Pandora’s Promise and A New Fire, anyone?) Stone really does do a masterful job of weaving imagery, narration, and animation together to tell the story of his personal journey to understanding the indispensability of nuclear.

What struck me in particular was Stone’s assertion that “we are running out of time to be afraid.” It made me think: How much time do we have left to lock in a durable shift in public opinion that can weather adverse events and clear public policy obstacles and still give the investment community confidence to put big chips on the table?

You don’t have to look far to find progress. Gallup released its annual “Americans’ Opinions of Nuclear Energy” poll in April. It shows a 4-point year-over-year increase in support for nuclear energy, which represents the highest level of support in the post-Fukushima era. Gallup’s numbers align with other polls that show steady increases in support for nuclear in the last few years, especially among the left-leaning respondents.

The nuclear advocacy group Atomic Garage Movement is looking for reviewers for its soon-to-be-published book Chain Reaction.

Interested in reviewing? Sign up on the Atomic Garage Movement’s website. Review copies will be sent in July.

For almost four decades, the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Ruth Patrick Science Education Center at the University of South Carolina–Aiken (USC Aiken) have partnered to bring science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education to the area's kindergarten through 12th grade students.

The latest National Nuclear Energy Public Opinion Survey conducted by Bisconti Research has found for the third year in a row that more than 75 percent of the U.S. public supports nuclear energy. In addition, approximately 70 percent of the public supports the building of additional nuclear power plants in the United States.

Not everyone in the nuclear industry is familiar with a series of 105 historic wall charts displaying detailed illustrations of nuclear reactors and their internal components, but Ronald A. Knief is. Knief, a retired professor of chemical and nuclear engineering at the University of New Mexico and former principal engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, has spent decades collecting these educational items, which were originally published as foldout inserts in Nuclear Engineering International magazine from the 1950s through early 2000s.

Claflin University students recently toured the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina to learn about the facilities and occupations there.

Nuclear Energy 101, a course for congressional staffers in D.C., is back. After a hiatus of a few years, the American Nuclear Society hosted the first session of the five-part course on March 1 in the Rayburn House Office Building. This educational series has always been a great—and popular—tool for ANS to network with congressional staff and explain the basics of nuclear science and technology. Now that the country has returned (in many ways) to pre-pandemic ways, ANS thought it was the perfect time to relaunch the Nuclear Energy 101 program.

Purdue University and Duke Energy released an interim report on May 10 that documents the first year of an ongoing feasibility study, first announced in April 2022, that could help bring nuclear power to the state of Indiana. No technology has been selected and no decision to build a new nuclear plant has been made at Purdue University or elsewhere in the state, but in the Small Modular Reactor and Advanced Reactor Feasibility Study Interim Report the study participants conclude that “small modular reactors and advanced reactors are a viable option that warrant continued exploration to meet the future carbon-free energy needs of Purdue University and Duke Energy Indiana.”

Earlier this year, the American Nuclear Society's newly formed Special Committee on Certification started conducting market research with the help of a third party contractor to determine the viability of a nuclear certification program. An initial survey was sent to the membership back in March with the goal of determining what certification programs were already available and what type of certification program ANS could develop to benefit the community.