September 18, 2007

NE Faculty meet with California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.

From left: Jasmina, Per, California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), Brian, Alan Pasternak, Don (sitting).
Caption: NE Faculty meet with California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) to discuss his ballot initiative to overturn California's obsolete  ban on the construction of new nuclear power plants. The formal ballot title of the initiative is "Nuclear Energy. Removal of Prohibition on the Construction of Nuclear Power Plants." Link : http://www.powercalifornia.com/

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September 12, 2007

FPA Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award to Prof. Brian Wirth

Fusion Power Associates Board of Directors has selected Prof. Wirth as the recipient of its 2007 Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award. This Award, established in 1987 in memory of MIT professor David J. Rose, recognizes outstanding technical accomplishment and leadership potential in the field of fusion engineering.

The Board recognizes Prof. Wirths' many contributions to the international fusion materials research program and, in particular, his outstanding papers on computational simulation of radiation damage events in irradiated fusion materials.

Congratulations to Prof. Wirth!

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September 6, 2007

John William Gofman, a UC Berkeley professor who revealed the link between cholesterol and heart disease and studied the risks of low-level radiation, has died. He was 88. Read more or visit:

• http://www.contracostatimes.com/obituaries/ci_6815750?nclick_check=1

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July 25, 2007

NE Ph.D. Student Kurt Terrani, spent his summer internship at Idaho National Laboratory. Read the story

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Thursday, May 10, 2007 -- 9:00 AM

Livermore Laboratory Contract with UC

Listen  Download (MP3)

http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/forum/2007/05/2007-05-10a-forum.mp3

The program discusses the selection of the University of California and its newly formed contractor, Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC, as the manager of the weapons laboratory.
Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

Marylia Kelley, executive director for Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)

Per Peterson, professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley

Zachary Coile, Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle

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Cal Day 2007, Saturday, April 21: The College of Engineering and UCB feature special activities for new and prospective students and their families. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is hosting a series of events, lab tours and activities throughout the day.

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Recently on Forum
Tue, Apr 10, 2007 -- 10:00 AM

• Chuck Devore, assemblyman (R-70th District of California) and author of AB 719
• John Hutson, president and CEO of the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group, LLC
• Loni Hancock, assemblywoman (D-14th District of California) and chair of the Committee on Natural Resources
• Per Peterson, professor and former chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley
• Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council

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Video Conferencing with Tokyo and Shanghai

A ceremony celebrating the inauguration of the Video Conference System among nuclear engineering departments at University of Tokyo, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and UC Berkeley was held at 5 pm, November 1, 2006, at the NE conference room in Etcheverry Hall. The system utilizes high-speed internet, and achieves high-quality images and sounds among three points around the Pacific. The system was donated to the Nuclear Engineering Departments at Shanghai and Berkeley by Tokyo with the fund provided by the Japanese government. Tokyo is planning to distribute the same device to other NE departments in the Pacific region to form a network. A test-drive of the system was successful. We had a toast with sparkling wine in Berkeley with participation of the NE Department Chair Professpr Jasmina Vujic, other faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students (it was 10 am in Tokyo so their five professors attending the ceremony unfortunately could just watch our toasting).

Nuclear power development is drawing more and more attention, especially in China. Having communication channels among NE departments in leading universities will be increasingly beneficial and important. Three NE departments are planning to share talks at colloquia, seminars, and some lectures through this video conferencing system. As the first occasion, the presentation by Dr. A. Bernstein of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the NE Departmental Colloquium on November 6, 2006 was successfully broadcasted to Tokyo. The second NE colloquium that was successfully broadcasted to Tokyo was the talk on “Iranian Nuclear Program” presented on Monday, November 27, 2006 by Dr. Vojin Joksimovich. The seminar rooms in Tokyo and Berkeley were full and there were a lot of questions from Tokyo and Berkeley groups.

University of Tokyo kindly agreed to make this system available for COE faculty members, for example, if they need face-to-face communications with Berkeley while they are in Tokyo. For more information, please contact Prof. Joonhong Ahn at (510) 642-5107 or email ahn@nuc.berkeley.edu.

The toast at Berkeley viewed from Tokyo (Nov1) and Colloquium participants in Tokyo (Nov 6)

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An Event: "A.T.O.M. Science Club FOR kids" Visit to UC Berkeley on 2/24/2007

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Per Peterson's talk "Current and Future Activities For Nuclear Energy in the United States" for the CITRIS Research Exchange is now available on line as are the slides

Per Peterson interviewed by Channel 2 regarding North Korea Nuclear Testing

Newsweek story about women in science/engineering, "Science and the Gender Gap" featuring Jasmina Vujic. It's part of the magazine's package of stories on women and leadership.

ANS STUDENT DESIGN CONTEST
Sponsored by the Education and Training Division of the ANS. Session organizer: H. L. Dodds (Univ of Tennessee). Chair: H. L. Dodds. All invited. The following entries have been selected by a panel of judges from industry as finalists in the 2006 Student Design Contest to be held at the ANS Winter Meeting in Albuquerque. N.M. November 12-16, 2006. Oral presentations will be made by students in front of a second panel of judges who will determine first and second place in each category.

Undergraduate Category
Use of Zirconium Hydride Fuel for Improved Long-life BWR Core Designs, Martin Robel, Lydia Im, H. Kim, Paul Monasterio, Robert Petroski, Adam Tang, and Beth Ellen Rosenberg (Univ of California-Berkeley)

Graduate Category
Heat Pipe Encapsulated Nuclear Heat Source, Max Fratoni, Lance Kim, Sara Mattafirri, and Robert Petroski (Univ of California-Berkeley)

PHYSOR-2006, ANS / CNS Topical Meeting on Reactor Physics: 1st Prize - Student Paper Awarded to Massimiliano Fratoni for his paper entitled "Optimal Hydride Fueled BWR Assembly Designs". Congratulations Massimiliano!

Jasmina Vujic with Vice Admiral John J. Grossenbacher (ret.), President and Director of Idaho National Laboratory, at the North American Young Generation in Nuclear Annual Workshop, held on May 16-17, 2006 in San Francisco.

BERKELEY LAB WINS FOUR PRESTIGIOUS 2006 "R&D 100" AWARDS FOR TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES
Dr. Ka-Ngo Leung, has won one of R&D Magazine's prestigious R&D 100 Awards for 2006. The editors' choices for the 100 most significant proven technological advances of the year, have gone to researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their colleagues. His award designee is: The High-Output Coaxial-Target Neutron Generator, invented and engineered by members of the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division and the Engineering Division -- a compact cylindrical neutron generator capable of emitting quadrillions of neutrons per second, enough to compete with large accelerator facilities.

Ionel Dragos Hau, in LLNL Science & Technology News, In a homeland security effort, Ionel Dragos Hau, a former nuclear engineering student at UC Berkeley and SEGRF participant, is working with Livermore’s Advanced Detector Group to develop a novel type of neutron spectrometer as part of his thesis on neutron detection.

July 6, 2006: Professor Jasmina Vujic,to present "Recent Advances in Nuclear Energy Technologies" at the Engineers Australia – WA Division Meeting. 12.30pm to 2.00pm, Auditorium, Engineers Australia, 712 Murray Street, West Perth, Australia

THE 150th anniversary of the birth of scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla is taking place next month – and one of the world’s biggest celebrations is in Western Australia. See the Perth based Tesla Forum.

Faculty, Students and Alumni at the ANS Conference UCB Reception
Pictures from the 2006 ANS Conference held in Reno, Nevada

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Mishima Award
In recognition of outstanding contributions in in nuclear fuels and materials development
presented to
Professor Donald Olander
For seminal contributions in the field of nuclear materials, especially in the area of fuel behavior, high temperature chemistry and the behavior of gases in solids.

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Paul R. Monasterio's, 2006 Student Speaker Commencement Speech

• Article from Engineering News: "Finding a niche: reflections on the past, thoughts on the future" by P. Monasterio

2006 Graduation Photos

Student pictures from the NA-YGN conference in San Francisco

Nuclear Engineering Student Awards announced

Spring 2006 UCB College of Engineering's Forefront Magazine "America's renaissance in nuclear power: Next-generation nuclear reactors strive for radical simplicity" by Professor Per Peterson

June 9 deadline for submitting both the Intent to Participate Form and the 900-word Summary to ANS for the 2006 ANS Student Design Contest. More detailed information about the Contest is provided online. Also, as an incentive to participate in the Contest, DOE’s University Programs Office (via John Gutteridge) intends to provide $1000 to each university that participates. All design oriented faculty and students are encouraged to participate!

• Letter announcement
• Intent to Participate & Guidelines Form
• Judges Evaluation Form.

NCCHPS would like to extend a warm welcome to Dr. Jasmina Vujic.
She presented a talk "UCB Nuclear Engineering Research Highlights in Imaging and Radiation Cancer Therapy" at the May 2006 NCCHPS meeting (link to registry information).

Cal Day 2006, Saturday, April 22: The College of Engineering and UCB feature special activities for new and prospective students and their families. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is hosting a series of events, lab tours and activities throughout the day. View the slide show!

High school teachers get dose of nuclear ed at the March 24 day-long workshop on nuclear science. The workshop was hosted by the NE department and sponsored by the Northern California Chapter of the Health Physics Society and the Northern California Section of the American Nuclear Society.

Nuclear Energy Power Panel Presentation: Dr Dave McCallen of LLNL and Dr Jasmina Vujic of UC Berkeley present a panel discussion on the state of Nuclear Energy on Tuesday March 28th. Come listen to what our experts have to say about this.

Monday, March 27, 2006 Front page of The Contra Costa Times Newspaper:
Cal's Nuclear Engineering Chief Powered by Genius
By Matt Krupnick, CONTRA COSTA TIMES
BERKELEY - Jasmina Vujic had tamed the nuclear field's ingrained sexism long before she inherited the bullwhip. The UC Berkeley professor took over the reins -- and the chair's traditional whip -- of the school's nuclear engineering department last year, becoming the first woman to chair a U.S. university's nuclear department. A native of the former Yugoslavia, Vujic also is the only woman faculty member in the Berkeley department's 47-year history.

February 1, 2006: Professor Peterson quoted in the New York Times regarding
"Iran's Civilian Nuclear Program May Link to Military, U.N. Says"
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and WILLIAM J. BROAD

California Section, American Chemical Society, February Program: "Revival of Nuclear Energy Option and Hydrogen Economy", presented by Dr. Jasmina Vujic, Thursday, February 23, 2006 at Spenger's Fish Grotto in Berkeley. Reservations required. $32.00 (students pay half price)!

Introducing Berkeley's 'Everyday Heroes': According to 4,000 undergraduates, quite a few staff and instructors regularly go above and beyond their job descriptions to help students. Lisa Zemelman, our Student Affairs Officer, has been singled out by Berkeley students as a "hero" in response to a brand-new question on the 2005 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) conducted by the Office of Student Research.

Researchers have dug up some surprising evidence casting doubt on the long-held belief that microbes are impervious to geographic constraints "Biogeography: Is Everything Everywhere?

Digging in. Jessica Green pursues Nitrosomonas bacteria at two high-altitude locations in Chile.

Congratulations to Blandine Laurenty and Grant Fukuda!

The AICHE Nuclear Engineering Division has awarded the annual Best Student Paper Award to Blandine Laurenty and Grant Fukuda, University of California at Berkeley. Student papers were judged based upon both the written paper and oral presentation. The NED officers and I were especially impressed by the oral presentation given at the annual meeting. ~Bond Calloway, Vice Chair, AICHE NED, Advanced Process Development Manager, Westinghouse Savannah River Company, Savannah River National Laboratory.

For new NE chair, future is looking radiant, indeed Even as a teenager, NE professor Jasmina Vujic knew she wanted to go into the nuclear field. “I was very interested in math and physics, particularly nuclear physics. It was a new field, an exciting field, and it attracted me,” she remembers telling a reporter from her high school newspaper. That was in the 1970s in her home country of Yugoslavia, where, she says, everyone was steered toward math and science.

U.C., MERCED PROFESSORS: Focus on interdisciplinary studies attracts range of teachers
The campus has also attracted many young graduates from top universities, like Jessica Green, 36, who earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley in nuclear engineering in 2001. She started "courting" UC Merced right after graduation and did research in Australia and at UC Davis and spent a year in Prague before being hired at Merced in July 2004.

"Going Beyond 10,000 Years at Yucca Mountain": U.C. Berkeley researchers, Professors Per Peterson and William Kastenberg, have issued a joint report co-authored with Professor Michael Corradini at the University of Wisconsin, analyzing a draft proposed safety standard for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository that was issued by the EPA on August 8. This joint UCB/UW report studies how the level of very long-term protection provided by the revised EPA standard compares to that provided for the disposal of other hazardous materials, and thus how the revised EPA standard meet the recommendation of the National Research Council that EPA might establish "consistent policies for managing risks from disposal of both long-lived hazardous non-radioactive materials and radioactive materials." The authors conclude that the revised EPA standard, which establishes performance requirements for the time period from 10,000 to 1-million years in the future, "would set a precedent that we should aspire to, in the future, for the management of all types of long-lived hazardous waste and for other human activities as well."

"California Energy Commission Reviews the Status of Nuclear Energy": the California Energy Commission will consider the potential role for nuclear energy in the state, in its upcoming Integrated Energy Policy Report for 2005. Professor Per Peterson spoke at a two-day CEC workshop on nuclear energy. His slides and talk are available.

A draft report commissioned by the CEC provides a status report on nuclear energy in California.

Pro New Nuke: In April, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, standing before members of the U.S. Congress, stated that "nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand." In last month's issue of Technology Review, 1960s icon Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote that "the only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power." Many environmentalists are none-too-thrilled at these public comments from their allies, current or former. On the other hand, UC Berkeley professor Jasmina Vujic is thrilled. According to her research, Moore and Brand are absolutely right.

Our Faculty on Sabbatical find a good home at LLNL

The U.S. Department of Energy Source Selecting Official for the NEER Program has recommended Ehud Greenspan's proposal, Solid-Core Heat-Pipe Nuclear Battery Type Reactor, be selected for negotiation. They anticipate making a grant award during the third quarter of FY 2005. Congratulations on Professor Greenspan's selection.

ENERGY NOTES, March 2005, Vol. 3, Issue 1. A RESOURCE FOR WHAT'S GOING ON IN ENERGY RESEARCH WITHIN THE UC CAMPUSES

• New Nuclear Directions: Will Safer, More Efficient Plants Break the U.S. Nuclear Power Freeze?

In a recent international ranking by the Times of London Higher Education Supplement, Berkeley Engineering was named the No.1 engineering and information technology (IT) college in the world--finally, a well-researched and highly reputable international ranking system that got it right! The weekly British newspaper also named Berkeley No. 4 on its list of the top 100 science universities.

"Protecting our Ports" To detect the clandestine transport of nuclear weapons materials, UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Stanley G. Prussin and Eric B. Norman, a senior nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), are working with scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to develop a nuclear detection method that may be 10,000 times more sensitive under some conditions than other approaches currently being tested.

Department Alumni Newsletter

The Generation IV Roadmap and supporting documentation. The Roadmap describes the research path to develop new, innovate nuclear energy systems with enhanced safety, environmental and waste characteristics, proliferation resistance, and economics.

The Department of Energy has now completed the Generation IV Roadmap, which identifies opportunities for the development of new nuclear energy systems with greatly reduced waste generation, simpler and more robust safety systems, enhanced proliferation resistance, and improved economics. Download the Roadmap.

Novel Nuclear Reactor (Batteries Included) - UC Lab Notes by David Pescovitz The latest nuclear reactor design on the drawing board at UC Berkeley promises less fuss and muss than today's nuclear power plants. The key to the safer and more user-friendly reactor is a self-contained nuclear heat source that only needs to be changed every 20 years. "I call it a nuclear battery," says Department of Nuclear Engineering professor-in-residence Ehud Greenspan.

An excellent recent comparison of the safety and environmental characteristics of different energy sources is now available.

Professor Per Peterson "Fusion Harnesses Power of the Stars" featured in UCB Forefront Magazine

Our new tutorial on Inertial Fusion Energy gives a nontechnical introduction to this technology and its potential economics.

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