UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A consortium led by Penn State has been awarded a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support the revitalization of nuclear facilities and equipment, while also growing workforce opportunities for students interested in pursuing careers in nuclear materials research and related fields.
The funding will support the creation of a new research consortium and shared facility that allows scientists and students to safely study nuclear materials using extremely small samples. By working at the microscopic scale, the amount of radioactive material needed is greatly reduced, which lowers radiation exposure, safety risks and waste while still providing valuable information about how materials behave in nuclear environments. The project will use advanced microscopes to prepare and study tiny samples that can be analyzed in standard laboratories and even examined remotely. The consortium will provide educational opportunities — especially for students and institutions that have traditionally had limited access — while supporting safer, more efficient advances in nuclear science and engineering.
The consortium, the Big 10+ Network for the Study of Nuclear Materials at the Microscale (BTN2M2), has eight collaborators from academic institutions, laboratories and industry professionals. Jon Schwantes, acting head of the Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering at Penn State, is the principal investigator on the project.
“This represents a game-changing opportunity for the broader academic community to engage in nuclear materials research to support advanced nuclear reactor designs,” Schwantes said.
The specialized facility to be located at Penn State’s Radiation Science and Engineering Center (RSEC), the same facility that houses Penn State's Breazeale Reactor, will be capable of handling bulk radioactive materials and fabricating microscopic samples, which can be distributed to the broader network to conduct a wide range of nuclear material studies. Bulk radioactive materials will be sent to the facility, where trained experts will create microscopic samples that can be handled and analyzed outside of a radiological facility.
“Only the microscopic samples will be used for experiments and analyses,” Schwantes said. “These samples will be 17 orders of magnitude smaller, or in numerical terms, roughly 100 quadrillion times smaller, than the bulk material, so the radioactive hazard represented by these samples is minuscule.”
Schwantes said that advanced nuclear materials research has historically been limited to a few well-funded laboratories, and their consortium hopes to broaden the scope of research in the field.
“Conducting nuclear materials research at the microscale diminishes the risk typically associated with these types of materials, allows for safe handling outside of nuclear facilities, and broadens the range of tools used for study,” Schwantes said. “This allows any university with a materials science program to contribute meaningfully to advanced nuclear materials research.”
Other Penn State project collaborators include Arthur Motta, professor of nuclear engineering; Xing Wang, assistant professor of nuclear engineering; Amanda Johnsen, assistant professor of nuclear engineering; Federico Scurti, assistant professor of nuclear engineering and of engineering science and mechanics; Josh Stapleton associate research professor in the Materials Research Institute; and Yang Yang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics and of nuclear engineering who also has an affiliation with the Materials Research Institute.
Collaborators from other institutions include Gary Was, Stephen Raiman, Todd Allen, Kevin Field and Emanuelle Marquis of the University of Michigan; Adrien Couet, Paul Wilson and Kumar Sridharan of the University of Wisconsin; Osman Anderoglu and Eric Lang of the University of New Mexico; Jessika Rojas and Carlos Castano of Virginia Commonwealth University; Stephen Taller of Oakridge National Laboratory, Daniel Murray of Idaho National Laboratory and Harold Maguire of Westinghouse Electrical Company.
The University Nuclear Research Infrastructure Revitalization award is funded through the Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program.
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