Two nuclear Ph.D. students at UT have just received high honors in the “Innovation and Fuel Cycle Research” award from the US Department of Energy, Fuel Cycle and Research Development.
A few years back, Nathan George received an internship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. George met with professors and really liked working in the lab, so much so that he applied to UT’s graduate school and was accepted.
Now the school is funding him to do research.
His award-winning research paper was titled “Neutronics Studies of Uranium-Based Fully Ceramic Micro-Encapsulated Fuel for PWR’s.”
PWR’s are pressurized water reactors. In essence, these reactors pump water under high pressure to the core of the reactor where it is heated by energy. Once it is heated, it transfers thermal energy where steams is produced and flows to turbines that spin the generator.
George and his lab team demonstrated in their project that they had a new design that could be just as efficient.
“None of them have the design that I simulated in them, but they have a similar design and we were just trying to show that they would work in those,” he said.
George said that he didn’t formulate the idea, but not many people have done anything like this before, and so in some ways it was an innovation.
“The fact that this is a study just shows it is what it is,” he said. “It’s not industry work, it’s just research. I might do all this work, and nothing may come of this. It could, however, eventually be commercialized and put in reactors that obtain power. We don’t know.”
For over a year George has worked on this paper, and now he is seeing the results.
Early on, George really didn’t think he had much of a chance to win; rather, he felt that he should submit the paper and see what would come of it. As it turned out, some major recognition and a cash prize of $1,500 came of it.
“Not many people won, so I guess it was kind of a shot in the dark,” he said of his paper. “I mean, I knew I wrote a quality paper. I knew that a lot of really smart minds went in to help formulate this work. So I knew that the lab having its name on there helped me know that it was a possibility that I could win. When the ‘Oak Ridge National Lab’ is on a paper it gets more credibility. ”
Like George, Cole Gentry is also a Ph.D. student at UT and he also received an award.
Sometimes teachers will send out emails or letters letting students know when contests arrive, and it was no different this time. Gentry received an email about contests for conference papers and submitted one.
The topic of Gentry’s paper was “Application of Fully Ceramic Micro-Encapsulated Fuel for Transuranic Waste Recycling in PWR’s.”
Gentry’s paper was centered on water reactors for recycling plutonium.
This paper was Gentry’s master’s thesis and said that he spent a moderate amount of research on it.
Sitting in a meeting one day, Gentry received a phone call.
“At first, I was thinking to myself, what is this again, I couldn’t even remember what Kathy Dixon (one of the coordinators for the contest) was talking about,” he said. “I had lost track of when the date was when they were supposed to announce it.”
Gentry feels privileged to have won this award, and said it’s important because it shows people value your work.
“It’s just a recognition of doing your work. What I do is significant and people value it.”
