Colloquiums

Soft X-ray synchrotron radiation methodologies are being developed to investigate a range of topics in fundamental actinide science and contribute to an improved understanding of chemical bonding throughout the periodic table. The synchrotron radiation investigations span a range of topics including the determination of electronic structure in actinide complexes and materials, developing the basis for new ligands by rational design for actinide separations, and radionuclide speciation for environmental science.

Speaker's Bio
David K. Shuh is the Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Center, Principal Scientist for the Molecular Environmental Sciences Beamline 11.0.2 at the Advanced Light Source, and a Senior Scientist in the Actinide Chemistry Group of the Chemical Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, USA. His current research focuses on the elucidation of electronic structure to understand the chemistry of a range of actinide and lanthanide materials. He is an expert in the use of synchrotron radiation techniques. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Riverside.

High gamma ray (GR) often occurs on open-hole well logs through steam zones of heavy-oil reservoirs undergoing enhanced oil recovery. Days later, after casing the well, GR through the same zones decreases by a factor of 10. The decrease in steam-zone GR is caused by the dissipation of near-wellbore condensate as wellbore temperature increases from 140oF in the cooled open-hole to 250oF and higher in the stabilized cased-hole. Condensation-induced natural gamma appears to provide a new method for identifying and characterizing condensable steam and hydrocarbon vapor, but the effect has not yet been reproduced in a laboratory environment.

Speaker's Bio
Terence P. O'Sullivan is a Technical Consultant focused on Petrophysics with Aera Energy LLC in Bakersfield, California. Aera Energy LLC is jointly owned by affiliates of Shell and ExxonMobil. With Aera, Terry is involved with reservoir characterization projects spanning a wide range of rock and fluid types from heavy-oil sands to unconventional, light-oil, shales. Prior to Aera, he was with Unocal for 12 years in California and Indonesia where he worked on oil, gas, geothermal and shale-oil projects. He has also worked for Maxus Southeast Sumatra and Ampolex. Terry has a BA in earth and planetary sciences from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in geology from Wright State University. He is a member of the SPWLA, SCA and SPE.

Carbon neutral forms of energy, such as fusion or fission, require development of new materials capable of sustaining the harsh environment in such reactors. Especially new reactor concepts or lifetime extension programs demand a basic understanding of the materials in use as well as covering a wide range of datasets. Classical material development is a timely and expensive process involving neutron exposure in testing reactors, and radiation facilities designed for high dose materials irradiations are not easily available today. Therefore, scientists and engineers seek new methods to irradiate and test materials to understand fundamental aspects of radiation damage, aiding the development of predictive models. In this presentation, we will address possibilities of alternative irradiation processes such as proton or ion irradiation in combination with small scale testing methods performed in-situ in electron microscopes. Utilizing this approach, we can enhance the understanding of dislocation based deformation in irradiated materials while scoping the “limit of scale” on small scale mechanical testing on the surrogate material copper. The methods of small scale mechanical testing on ion beam irradiated materials are introduced and basic material science processes are discussed.

Speaker's Bio
Dr. Daniel Kiener received his PhD in materials science at the Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria. After holding post-doc positions in Munich and Berkeley, he returned to the Montanuniversität Leoben as an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Physics. His research interest focuses on the field of small scale mechanics, aiming to understand size effects and strengthening mechanisms in miniaturized samples. In particular, Dr. Kiener is renewed for developing quantitative in-situ testing methods in the scanning and transmission electron microscope. The significance of his work is reflected by the recognition in the community (Most cited article since 2008, Acta Materialia; Top cited Author 2011, Materials Science and Engineering: A) and was awarded multiple times, for example with the Fritz-Kohlrausch prize, the highest physics award of the Austrian Physical Society.

The inverted fuel design has coolant channels with a continuous fuel region in contrast to the traditional fuel pin design. It offers the advantages of shorter fuel thermal path length, reduced pressure drop, elimination of fuel pin fretting, and smaller coolant void fraction compared to the fuel pin geometry under comparable assembly power rating. These factors offer the potential for designs of high power density and specific power rating. Thermal and fast reactor inverted fuel designs which have been proposed have unique strategies for control of the fission gases. The design of an inverted hydride-fueled PWR core is presented to illustrate the design tradeoffs necessary to achieve a high power density with this novel fuel configuration.

Speaker's Bio
Dr. Neil E. Todreas is the Korea Electric Power Corporation Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His professional focus has been on thermal and hydraulic aspects of nuclear reactor engineering and safety analysis. He previously headed the Nuclear Engineering Department at MIT and has been Co-Director of the MIT Nuclear Power Reactor Safety Summer Seminar since 1975. Dr. Todreas spent four of his nine years working at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as a naval officer in the headquarters of the Naval Nuclear Power Organization.
He has served on a number of advisory committees of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, many of DOE’s national laboratories such as Idaho National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, Argonne National Lab and Brookhaven National Lab, and as a member of several U.S. utility safety review committees. He has additionally authored three books relating nuclear reactor energy extraction and safety. He is a fellow of the ASME and the ANS and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he received the Henry DeWolf Smyth Nuclear Statesman Award on behalf of his many contributions to nuclear energy activities. Dr. Todreas earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell University and a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mechanical property degradation due to the disorder to order phase transformation is of potential concern for alloys based on the Ni-Cr binary system (e.g., 690), particularly in nuclear power applications where component lifetimes can exceed 40 years. In the present research, the disorder-order phase transformation has been studied in the Ni-33 at% Cr model alloy by a combined experimental and computational approach. The multiscale modeling framework utilizes grand canonical and kinetic Monte Carlo simulation techniques based upon density functional theory calculations to treat both the thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of the phase transformation. The simulation results are used to generate a simple model for the ordering kinetics based upon the Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami equation. Experimental measurements of the change in lattice parameter as a function of aging time and temperature are obtained in order to assess the model accuracy.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Tucker earned her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Missouri – Rolla. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison as a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Fellow, where she received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering with an emphasis in Materials Science in 2008. After graduation, Dr. Tucker accepted employment at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) in Schenectady, NY. At KAPL, Dr. Tucker has focused on the area thermal stability of structural alloys used in nuclear power systems. Her research efforts leverage both modeling and experimental approaches to gain fundamental understanding of embrittlement mechanisms in Fe- and Ni-based alloys.

By around a microsecond after the Big Bang, the cosmos had cooled sufficiently so that quarks and gluons could coalesce into protons and neutrons. During the next few minutes, deuterium, helium, and a small amount of lithium nuclei were formed. One can use nuclear reaction cross sections obtained in the laboratory to predict the abundances of these elements which can be compared with astronomical observations. However, the most basic cross section, that for the formation of deuterium, has not yet been well-measured.

Speaker's Bio
Professor Matthews received her B.A. in Physics from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1960 and her Ph.D. from MIT in 1967. After postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Rutgers University, New Jersey, she joined the MIT faculty in 1973. Professor Matthews served as Academic Officer in the Physics Department between 1994 and 1998. From 2000-06 she served as Director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Professor Matthews is a member of the American Association of Physics Teachers, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics (UK).

Planetary energy supply over the next few decades is shown to be a slow-moving, immensely large, and technically very challenging set of issues to address. The concept of “planetary-scale sustainable energy” is introduced to describe technologies or combinations of technologies that are capable of meeting this challenge. Nuclear energy’s ability to play a unique role in sustainable energy is described, and implications for fuel cycles and nuclear safety are highlighted. TerraPower’s mission is to advance nuclear energy technologies to be able to meet these challenges; a summary is given on TerraPower’s approach as well as its current progress on developing the Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR).

Speaker Bio
Robert Petroski is a nuclear innovation engineer at TerraPower, where he leads core thermal hydraulic design and researches advanced core and reactor configurations. He graduated with bachelor’s degrees in nuclear engineering and engineering physics from U.C. Berkeley, then received a master’s degree from MIT for the design of a novel molten salt cooled fast reactor. He then began working for TerraPower while it was still part of its parent company, Intellectual Ventures, and while working there returned to MIT to complete his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the physics of breed-and-burn reactors. Robert is a member of the American Nuclear Society and the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, an Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative Fellow, a first place winner in the Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research competition, and a named inventor on numerous TerraPower patents. Along with two other nuclear engineers, he was recently included in the Forbes “30 under 30” list of young innovators in the Energy category.

The design of the European Lead Cooled Training Reactor (ELECTRA) is currently under development at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. It consists in a pool-type, low-power (0.5 MWth), fast neutron system cooled by liquid lead and operating under natural circulation of the coolant, mainly intended for demonstration and training purposes. Application of (Pu, Zr)N fuel permits the design of a core with very small volume and fuel column height, resulting in highly negative coolant, fuel, and structure temperature coefficients, and very low channel pressure drop.

An analytical model has been developed to study the core dynamic performance and stability of ELECTRA. A dedicated dynamics simulation tool solving simultaneously time-dependent equations for neutronics and thermal-hydraulics has been developed based on point kinetics for the former physics, and on a lumped-parameter formulation of energy and momentum balances for the latter. Constitutive equations have been linearized around different working conditions so as to enable Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) analysis tools to be employed to investigate the core stability on the entire power range, and to assess the impact of uncertainties affecting the Doppler coefficient. The reactor dynamic response has been studied against such a fundamental neutronics parameter by simulating three typical design-basis transient scenarios initiated by a partial control drum rotation, by an undesired increase of core pressure drop, and by an enhancement of the coolant core inlet temperature.

Analysis of stability and performance under unprotected transients show that the suggested design is very safe, supporting its intended use for educational purposes.

Speaker Bio
Dr. Sara Bortot is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reactor Physics Department of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.

She received her Bachelor’s degree in Physics Engineering (2005) and her Master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering (2007) from Politecnico di Milano, where she completed her doctoral studies in Radiation Science and Technology (2011) under the joint mentorship of Prof. Marco Ricotti (PoliMI), Dr. Carlo Artioli (ENEA), Dr. Luciano Cinotti (M.E.Rivus) and Dr. James Sienicky (ANL). She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship offered by the Italian Fulbright Commission in 2009.

Her primary scientific interests focus on advanced, fast-spectrum systems, and in particular on Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs) design and analysis. She has been working on the core neutronics design and transient analyses of two diverse LFR technology demonstrators, contributing both to the ELSY and the LEADER projects of the European Community, and to the I-NERI project on LFR development. Her current research pertains to dynamics and stability analyses directed to the design finalization of the European Lead Cooled Training Reactor (ELECTRA).

Further research interests and experience include a study of the kinetics and dynamics of a subcritical, low-power, fast-spectrum, experimental facility in collaboration with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN).

Techniques utilizing nuclear radiation, emanating naturally from geological media or from man-made radioisotope sources, play a key role in solving a wide range of problems in hydrocarbon exploration and production, fundamental earth science studies, evaluation of the geology for radioactive waste disposal, and mining. These techniques, initially based on backscattered radiation, are evolving to use of spectroscopic data to allow dynamic characterization of rock and fluid properties, monitoring of movement of stored radioisotopes, and study of flow characteristics, with a range of interpretations unattainable from any other single subsurface technique. Research is underway to replace current radioisotope-based devices, which pose serious safety and security concerns, with electronic generators-based devices, with multiple detectors. The new devices will allow simultaneous estimation of multiple petrophysical parameters, reduce risks associated with conventional sources, and provide a much better forensic assessment of the subsurface. However, changing sources alters the physics, raises major interpretations challenges, and introduces a different set of safety concerns.



After an introduction of the fundamentals of subsurface nuclear methods and their benefits, the talk will discuss the advanced devices under development, and associated challenges. The talk will identify future research opportunities on the subject, including possible use of Muons which may someday provide km-range geological investigation vs. the shallow (5-50 cm) range of current (neutron and photon-based) subsurface nuclear measurements.

Speaker Bio
Ahmed Badruzzaman has over 30 years experience in nuclear technology R&D with leadership roles in petroleum and nuclear industry organizations, and at Sandia National Laboratories. He recently retired early from Chevron to pursue a return to academic research and teaching. His current research interests include advanced subsurface nuclear measurement techniques, novel nuclear reactors for process heat needed in unconventional fossil fuel resource recovery and in-situ power needed in subsea applications, and distributed energy systems. Since 2001, he has offered a graduate course, Subsurface Nuclear Technology, at the Department of Nuclear Engineering, U C Berkeley, and has also mentored graduate students. Author of over 40 papers, and a US patent, and winner of many industry awards, Ahmed is a Fellow of American Nuclear Society and was a 2006-2007 Distinguished Lecturer (DL) of the Society of Petroleum Engineers traveling to over 20 countries. He was the 2009-2010 editor of the journal, Petrophysics, and leads the Nuclear Logging SIG, an industry group to guide the R&D direction on nuclear techniques used in geological applications. He was an official reviewer of the 2008 US National Academy of Science report to Congress, “Radiation Source Use and Replacement.” He is currently a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the subsurface source handling guide the IAEA are developing for worldwide deployment. Dr. Badruzzaman earned a Ph. D in Nuclear Science and Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1979.

Is any thermal-hydraulics system code more stable than a reactor? Nowadays most reactor system analysis codes solve two-phase flow equations using the first-order upwind differencing scheme for spatial discretization such as TRACE, and RELAP, etc. While very robust, first-order upwinding leads to excessive numerical diffusion. Standard higher-order methods can effectively reduce numerical diffusion, but often produce spurious oscillations for steep gradients. In this talk, we will present our recent work on second-order flux limiter schemes. These high-resolution methods can overcome many of the difficulties associated with standard second-order schemes.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has launched a Strategic Priority Research Program named “Advanced Fission Energy Program” in January 2011 to confront two grand challenges in the nuclear energy world – long-term nuclear fuel supply and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The program consists of two projects, the TMSR (Thorium Molten Salt Reactor) and the ADS. The TMSR project is to utilize the thorium energy via the development of molten salt and molten salt-cooled reactor technologies, in order to secure the long-term nuclear fuel supply by diversifying the sources of the fuel. By around 2035, the TMSR project shall build a 1000MWe molten salt-cooled demonstration reactor and a 100MWe molten salt demonstration reactor (liquid fuel), as well as possess the technologies that pave the road to commercialization of the thorium-fueled nuclear energy systems. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics is leading the efforts to build a 2 MW molten salt research reactor in five years. A center dedicated to TMSR research (TMSR Center) has already been established.

Success in nuclear forensics search is a critical component to fighting terrorist activity and preventing disastrous individual terrorist nuclear attacks. The UC Berkeley Nuclear Forensic Search Project takes a computer science algorithmic approach (as a special directed graph matching problem) to address nuclear forensics search, essentially recasting nuclear forensics discovery as a digital library search problem. A simultaneous aim is to encourage other computer scientists to work on nuclear forensics search.

This talk will describe our project, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office's Academic Research Initiative. After historical background on nuclear forensics, we will focus on three approaches to identification of sources of interdicted nuclear material -- matching based upon properties of isotopes and isotope ratio measurements, exclusion based upon machine learning to identify nuclear spent fuel by reactor type or uranium ores by geologically specific element composition, and capturing the logic of the forensic process by which a human nuclear forensic expert would engage the attribution challenge. We will describe the results of our preliminary search experiments using the OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency's SFCOMPO Spent Fuel Database, which will be presented in mid-September at the German Informatik (LWA) conference at the University of Dortmund

Every few years, the French section of the American Nuclear Society hosts a group of American nuclear engineering faculty members on a whirlwind tour of French nuclear facilities.

This July, 12 US faculty members, including two current and one former member of the UCB Nuclear Engineering Dept., were invited to participate. During a six-day period we travelled over 2400 km throughout France. Technical visits were made to the Saclay Laboratory, Melox fuel fabrication plant, Chalon large LWR components fabrication plant, Bure underground waste repository, La Hague reprocessing plant, and an EPR construction site. In addition, a number of presentations were given describing the French nuclear engineering educational system.

In this talk we will share our impressions of this tour and will point out differences and similarities between the French and US approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle.

General meeting of the Nuclear Engineering Graduate Student Association (NEGSA).
We will be holding elections and discussing the future direction of the group.
All graduate students welcome!

Streaming video of talk by Prof. Ahn.

Professor Peterson was interviewed on the topic of nuclear energy and features our work here at UC Berkeley.
KQED Video Link

Over the past half century the manufacture of coated particle fuel can be described as a process in transition from one based on qualitative observation to one led by the quantitative relation of deposition parameters to microstructure and mechanical properties. Today this has resulted in an unsurpassed level of fuel performance in high-temperature gas reactor environments combined with the ability to extend the fuel into performance regimes not previously considered. For this reason, fuel and reactor designers are engineering concepts for this fuel for platforms including light water reactors, molten salt reactors and very high temperature gas cooled reactors. While the microencapsulated fuel particle is the constant motif, new areas are currently being examined to improve the performance of the fuel form and tailor its properties to meet optimized reactor design requirements. These areas include advanced kernel chemistries, redesign of the particle geometry, and new matrix materials to host the microencapsulated fuel particles. The latter is specifically of importance to enable effective deployment of this fuel technology into light water reactors and could prove beneficial to other advanced reactor designs (e.g. salt). The focus of this discussion will be on the fully ceramic microencapsulated (FCM) fuel concept with uranium nitride TRISO particles embedded in a SiC matrix which is under specific development for LWR and potentially FHR applications.

Antineutrino emission rates and energy spectra encode information about the operational status, total power output, and fissile content of operating nuclear reactors. Researchers in Russia in the 1980s, and more recently our group in the US, have experimentally demonstrated that ton-scale antineutrino detectors operating outside of containment at some tens of meters for nuclear reactor cores can be used to measure these signals. The devices are no more complex, and by some measures are easier to deploy, then, e.g., the hundreds of portal monitors that have already been deployed in the US and elsewhere for the purpose of screening automobiles, pedestrians, and cargo for nuclear materials. The antineutrino experiments have further shown that data can be collected on time scales – from hours to months - that are of interest for existing and future reactor monitoring protocols, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency's 'Safeguards' regime.


Much larger detectors, from 100,000 to 1,000,000 tons, would be sensitive to signals from small reactors operating at distances of hundreds of kilometers, and this tantalizing prospect has begun to attract the attention of the nonproliferation community. Detectors of this kind, based on water doped with gadolinium, are also being developed by the physics community, to pursue fundamental studies of neutrino properties. In this presentation I will discuss work undertaken by our group towards the realization of both large and small antineutrino detectors for nonproliferation applications, and explain the natural overlap of technology with needs identified by the fundamental neutrino physics community.

This presentation will introduce the Cyclus next generation fuel cycle simulation environment, which provides an open and flexible computational framework for nuclear fuel cycle analysis. An important goal of the Cyclus effort is to attract a community of developers who will benefit from a shared simulation framework while contributing to a vibrant ecosystem of models.



Developed at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the Cyclus modeling paradigm follows the transaction of discrete quanta of material among discrete facilities, arranged in a geographic and institutional framework, and trading in flexible markets. Key concepts in the design of Cyclus include open access to the simulation engine, modularity with regard to functionality, and relevance to both scientific and policy analyses. The combination of modular encapsulation within the software architecture and an open development paradigm allows for a balance between collaboration at multiple levels of simulation detail and security of proprietary or sensitive data.



The Cyder generic repository model will also be introduced to provide an illustrative example of a developer contributed model and the independent analysis that can be conducted using the Cyclus framework. Cyder is an assessment tool for evaluating nuclear spent fuel disposal options in the context of fuel cycles and seeks to inform national research and policy direction in the areas of fuel cycle options and nuclear repository performance.

The climate for nuclear arms reductions has changed positively in recent years with the statements of the “Gang of Four” (Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn) that there is a credible path to zero, the ratification of the NEW START Treaty, the successful review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the resubmission for ratification of the CTBT. Jay Davis (BA Physics, UT, ’63), who served as an UNSCOM inspector in Iraq after the first Gulf War and as the head of all US inspection processes as first Director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, recently lead an APS/POPA study on the technology needs for future arms control treaties. However, in addition to technology, many other issues matter as the number of nuclear weapons is decreased. Among these are changes to theories of deterrence and the nuclear umbrella over non-nuclear states, the lesser granularity of military platforms that support the weapons, increased credibility of missile defensive systems, and the coupling of conventional and nuclear weapons, among others. Davis will walk the audience through a progressive set of weapons reductions that illustrate these points. Comparison to either Zeno’s Paradox or Dante’s Circles is discouraged.