MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Friday Feature: NSE's Liam Hines models different advanced reactor designs to determine strategies to manage waste before they are built and ensure that policy keeps up with technology.

Liam Hines: Ensuring that nuclear policy keeps up with nuclear technology. Liam Hines is excited about the practical and societal benefits of his work, about pinpointing the challenges posed by existing technologies, and finding sol...

Friday Feature: Celebrating Professor Jack Hare who received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching & Professor Mike Short who received the Capers (1976) and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising. Congratulations! MIT School of Engineering https://news.mit.edu/2024/school-engineering-awards-0910

Friday Feature: NSE's Guoqing Wang has channeled a deep love of physics to the study of different aspects of quantum sciences. One focus is on advancing control techniques to improve quantum systems’ performance by targeting parameters such as coherence time. Better coherence leads to more stable and longer-lived quantum systems for a variety of applications, including computing. He developed a technique that improves coherence by a factor of 20. https://web.mit.edu/nse/news/spotlights/2024/guoqing-wang.html

Friday Feature: Research by NSE’s Ju Li, Yimeng Huang, and collaborators describe a new family of integrated rock salt-polyanion cathodes that opens the door to low-cost, high-energy storage.

Study of disordered rock salts leads to battery breakthrough A new class of partially disordered rock salt cathode is a potential breakthrough for lithium-ion batteries and a key to creating low-cost, high-energy storage.

Professor Jacopo Buongiorno spoke to Nick O’Hara about the state of the nuclear industry and shifts in public attitudes toward

https://renovata.vision/discourse/is-nuclear-already-squandering-its-renaissance

Friday Feature: NSE's Alexander Edwards, an Army ROTC cadet chats about his research experience in an MIT program ( ) focused on the challenges that a soldier in the field might face.

3 Questions: From the bench to the battlefield MIT rising senior and Army ROTC cadet Alexander Edwards and alumnus Aneal Krishnan discuss a new Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program fellowship with the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Friday Feature: A team led by NSE's Mingda Li, has demonstrated a new, ultra-precise way to tweak the characteristics of quantum materials, using Weyl semimetals, as an example. The new technique could be used for control of properties of any inorganic bulk material, and for thin films as well. https://news.mit.edu/2024/new-approach-fine-tuning-quantum-materials-0812

Friday Feature: NSE's Professor Ju Li and a team of MIT engineers have demonstrated that adding nanoparticles of certain ceramics to the metals can protect them from damage and significantly extend their lifetime under extreme conditions.
https://energy.mit.edu/news/more-durable-metals-for-fusion-power-reactors/

Vanity license plates of MIT community members display expressions of scholarship, creativity, “nerd” culture, Institute pride, and more. Curtis Smith PhD ’02, professor of the practice in NSE, recently joined the MIT faculty after 33 years at the Idaho National Lab — the license plate on his convertible reads “MITGRAD” https://news.mit.edu/2024/license-plates-of-mit-0722

Friday Feature: NSE's Bilge Yildiz and an MIT team have identified a class of materials called solid acids as likely to be fast proton conductors. These materials could enable a variety of technologies, such as more efficient and durable fuel cells to produce clean electricity from hydrogen, electrolyzers to make clean fuels such as hydrogen for transportation, solid-state proton batteries, and even new kinds of computing devices based on iono-electronic effects.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/proton-conducting-materials-could-enable-new-green-energy-technologies-0723

Friday Feature: An estimated 70% of energy generated globally ends up as waste heat. A new method could help models predict a material's thermal properties and result in more efficient energy-conversion systems reducing waste heat.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/ai-method-radically-speeds-predictions-materials-thermal-properties-0716

Friday Feature: Celebrating Richard K Lester, vice provost for international activities and Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, honored with the 2024 Gordon Y. Billard Award. The award is given to individuals who have had impact beyond normal job duties, and created important, lasting, and wide-ranging contributions to the MIT community. https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-excellence-awards-collier-medal-staff-award-distinction-0711

Friday Feature: Meet our newly tenured faculty — 3 professors in NSE — Matteo Bucci, Zach Hartwig, Koroush Shirvan. Congratulations!
https://news.mit.edu/2024/tenured-engineers-2024-0701

Friday Feature: Ten NSE and Physics graduate students who wanted hands-on experience, designed and built Altator, a toroidal fusion device which produced its first plasma earlier this year. Housed at MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Altator will be used to demonstrate how plasma flows and is confined within the donut-shaped architecture of a tokamak.
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/news/2024/student-designed-altator-achieves-first-plasma

Friday Feature: NSE graduate student Thomas Varnish's love of capturing a fleeting moment on film translates to his research when he conducts laser interferometry on plasmas using off-the-shelf cameras. MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Thomas Varnish: Studying plasma behavior in the context of astrophysical environments NSE graduate student Thomas Varnish's love of capturing a fleeting moment on film translates to his research when he conducts laser interferometry on plasmas...

Congratulations Professor Bilge Yildiz — winner of the 2024 Faraday Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry, which is awarded for outstanding contributions and innovation in electrochemistry. Yildiz's research focuses on the fundamentals of electrochemistry in materials that conduct ions, advancing fuel cells, electrolyzers, batteries, and brain-inspired computing devices. MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)
https://web.mit.edu/nse/news/2024/yildiz-faraday-medal.html

Friday Feature: “I think it’s this unique and wonderful intersection of the forward-looking and innovative nature of academia with real world impact and specificity that you’d typically only find in industry,” NSE's Emile Germonpre says of a class that challenged students to evaluate technologies to help MIT decarbonize. “It lets you work on a tangible project, the MIT campus, while exploring technologies that companies today find too risky to be the first mover on.” MIT Climate https://news.mit.edu/2024/students-research-mit-decarbonization-goals-0607

Friday Feature: Eli Sanchez, who recently completed his doctoral research on nuclear weapons security in NSE, investigated whether hypersonic missiles threaten global security. He will continue with postdoctoral work in MIT Security Studies Program.

Modeling the threat of nuclear war As part of his MIT doctoral studies in nuclear science and engineering, Eli Sanchez investigated whether hypersonic missiles threaten global security.

Congratulations to our graduating students!
https://web.mit.edu/nse/news/2024/NSE-commencement.html

Congratulations to our award winners announced at the annual awards we dinner co-hosted with the student chapter of the American Nuclear Society. https://web.mit.edu/nse/news/awards/nse2024.html

Friday Feature: NSE grad student Sara Hauptman, a recipient of the Theos J. Thompson Memorial Fellowship has been a part of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab since she was an undergrad in the Department. "I’ve been in a unique position here at the lab starting as undergrad and then an employee and then a grad student, and it has been really good for me in terms of professional and academic development. I’ve learned a lot." https://betterworld.mit.edu/sara-hauptman-19

Friday Feature: MIT's student-driven Committed to Caring (C2C) program celebrates faculty members who have served as exceptional mentors to graduate students. NSE's Zach Hartwig is one of 23 honored for their commitment to the well-being, growth, and success of their students.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/23-mit-faculty-honored-committed-caring-2023-25-0422

Friday Feature: As he takes the helm of MIT's MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and its multidisciplinary portfolio of research, Nuno Loureiro is focused on "building a scientific agenda that continues and expands on the PSFC’s history of innovation in all aspects of fusion science and engineering" and shaping the future of these fields.

Nuno Loureiro named director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center Nuno Loureiro is the new director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, succeeding Dennis Whyte. Loureiro will lead efforts in fusion energy research, plasma physics, and collaborations with partners like Eni, IBM, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Friday Feature: How can quantum materials be brought into technology and mass production for the benefit of broader society? NSE's Mingda Li is finding pathways to scale up sustainable topological materials for real-world applications. With superior electronic performance these materials have the potential to revolutionize next-generation microelectronics. His research has received $5M in funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator.

Two MIT teams selected for NSF sustainable materials grants Two MIT-led teams received funding from the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator to investigate quantum topological materials and sustainable microchip production.

Friday Feature: NSE's Professor Ju Li and a team from MIT demonstrated a new way to detect radiation that could allow much cheaper detectors and a vast range of other applications.

A new way to detect radiation involving cheap ceramics A new way to detect radiation involving cheap ceramics could lead to plethora of new applications, including better detectors for nuclear materials at ports.

Friday Feature: A new detector system based on simple tetromino shapes could determine the direction and distance of a radiation source with fewer detector pixels, and enable inexpensive, accurate radiation detectors for monitoring nuclear sites. The findings, by the team from MIT and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, may generalize to detectors for other kinds of radiation.

With inspiration from “Tetris,” MIT researchers develop a better radiation detector A new detector system based on the game “Tetris” could enable inexpensive, accurate radiation detectors for monitoring nuclear sites.

Friday Feature: A study by graduate students Hao Tang and Guoqing Wang, and Professors Ju Li and Paola Cappellaro, identified “neutronic” molecules, in which neutrons can be made to cling to quantum dots, held just by the strong force. The finding may lead to new tools for probing material properties at the quantum level and exploring new kinds of quantum information processing devices.

MIT researchers discover “neutronic molecules” MIT researchers discovered “neutronic” molecules, in which neutrons can be made to cling to quantum dots, held just by the strong force. The finding may lead to new tools for probing material properties at the quantum level and exploring new kinds of quantum information processing devices.

Friday Feature: A new study by NSE's Ali Ayoub and Professor Haruko Wainwright along with collaborators in Switzerland, Japan, and New Mexico maps how the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear accident unfolded and points to the importance of mitigation measures and last lines of defense.

Lessons from Fukushima: Prepare for the unlikely A new study maps how the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear accident unfolded, and points to the importance of mitigation measures and last lines of defense. These procedures have received relatively little attention, but they are critical in determining how severe the consequences of a reactor failure wi...

Friday Feature: Sporadic energy access in his native Nigeria set NSE's Professor Ericmoore Jossou on the path to nuclear engineering — “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that can easily be scaled to meet the energy needs of the world, including my own country.”

Optimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors MIT Assistant Professor Ericmoore Jossou uses computer simulations for rational materials design, AI-aided purposeful development of cladding materials, and fuels for next-generation nuclear reactors.

Friday Feature: Professor Anne White is one of many MIT professors who teach MITx courses and continue the legacy of creating better opportunities for all.
https://medium.com/open-learning/meet-8-mit-women-faculty-who-teach-mitx-courses-and-lead-cutting-edge-research-a685e2b89c6a