February 2021

February 26, 2021February 3, 2021

NuScale Power – A Scalable Clean Energy Solution

SPEAKER:

José N. Reyes, Jr.

Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder

DATE/TIME:

FRI, 02/26/2021 - 3:00PM TO 4:00PM

LOCATION:

VIA ZOOM

SPRING 2021 Colloquium Series

Abstract:

Recent studies show that the addition of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to the renewable energy mix offers the least cost path to achieving clean energy mandates. NuScale Power has developed and received NRC approval for its SMR technology with customers seeking to deploy the technology within this decade. The potential for hydrogen production as part of a NuScale Integrated Energy System provides an exciting opportunity for carbon reductions in both the industrial and transportation section. This presentation provides an overview of the NuScale technology and its path to commercialization.

About the Speaker:

José N. Reyes, Jr., P.E., Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. and M.S. Univ. of Maryland, B.S. Univ. of Florida is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of NuScale Power. He is co-inventor of the NuScale small modular reactor with over 110 patents granted or pending in 20 countries. He is an expert on nuclear plant scaling, passive safety, and testing. He is Professor Emeritus and former head of the Dept. of Nuclear Engineering at Oregon State University. He is an ANS Fellow and Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

February 22, 2021March 12, 2021

Professor Max Fratoni awarded the Xenel Distinguished Professorship

February 19, 2021

Professor Max Fratoni was awarded the Xenel Distinguished Professorship to honor his tireless effort for science, education, and service. He joins 3 other distinguished and chaired faculties in the department, and will hold the appointment for 5 years. This is an indication of the excellence we embody in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and of the contributions we make to UC Berkeley.

Congratulations Professor Fratoni!

February 19, 2021February 17, 2021

Personalized Cancer Radiotherapy Through In Vivo Sensing

SPEAKER:

Mekhail Anwar, MD PhD

Associate Professor, Radiation Oncology

profiles.ucsf.edu/mekhail.anwar | anwarlab.ucsf.edu

mekhail.anwar@ucsf.edu

DATE/TIME:

FRI, 02/19/2021 - 3:00PM TO 4:00PM

LOCATION:

via zoom

Spring 2021 Colloquium Series

Abstract:

We will discuss how to personalize cancer therapy through the development of new integrated circuit-based platforms for detecting both the delivery of charged particle therapy (CPT).

Real-time in vivo dosimetry - at the single particle level - holds the key to unlocking the power of personalized theranostics with both 𝛼 and β particles and the precision of proton therapy. The impact of theranostics using Lu177 - a β emitter - is already being felt across neuroendocrine and prostate cancers. Notably, 𝛼 particles deposit over 100X more energy over just 50 µm - making them a much more powerful - and potentially preciscse - therapeutic. However, this enthusiasm is tempered by the highly variable biodistribution making in vivo dosimetry essential to safe, personalized delivery. Similarly, range uncertainty is a major limiting factor in precision targeting of charged particle therapy, and would benefit from real-time in vivo dosimetry. To address these dual challenges, we have developed SENTRI - a mm² chip capable of single CPT measurements from within tissue - and will discuss how efforts to fuse proton therapy and personalized theranostics can improve outcomes in patients with aggressive cancers.

About the Speaker:

Mekhail Anwar is a Physician-Scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), focusing on developing microfabricated sensors and computer chip technology (‘integrated circuits’ or ICs) for cancer detection within the body. Educated at UC Berkeley in Physics, he completed his MD at UC San Francisco, and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his Ph.D. in electrical engineering focused on using ICs for biosensing. He returned to complete his residency in Radiation Oncology at UCSF and continued as faculty, where he earned the DOD Prostate Cancer Research Program Physician Award for his work in cancer imaging. He is the recipient of the NIH Trailblazer Award for developing chip-scale imagers for cancer and was recently awarded the NIH (DP2) New Innovator Award for in vivo imaging of immunotherapy response.

February 15, 2021March 1, 2021

UCBNE Researchers and the search for Dark Matter

February 12, 2021

UCBNE Professor Karl van Bibber and his group of researchers were featured on campus news for their recent publication in Nature introducing a new experiment to harness the "weirdness of quantum mechanics to accelerate the search for the axion, one of two leading hypothetical subatomic particles that may make up the bulk of dark matter in the universe."

This new technique, called quantum squeezing, allowed the HAYSTAC detector to search for axions at twice the speed as before. “The HAYSTAC detector was already essentially at the quantum limit, and now we’ve actually found a way of circumventing the quantum limit entirely,” said co-author Karl van Bibber, executive associate dean at Berkeley’s College of Engineering and one of the senior researchers on the HAYSTAC project. “Several theoretical works are now predicting that the axion mass is right in the frequency range where HAYSTAC is ready to go next. And we’ve got the cavities and amplifiers all lined up and ready to search.”

Great work and congratulations to the research team, Very exciting developments!

February 12, 2021February 2, 2021

Nuclear Landscapes: planning for nuclear waste disposal using cultural heritage thinking

SPEAKER:

Rosemary Joyce

Professor of Anthropology

DATE/TIME:

FRI, 02/12/2021 - 3:00PM TO 4:00PM

LOCATION:

ZOOM

Spring 2021 Colloquium Series

Abstract:

The global nuclear industry has for decades used sites like Stonehenge as models for designs for long-term markers to be placed over nuclear waste repositories to ensure they are not violated in distant, imagined futures. In the US, the resulting proposal would produce a pre-formed archaeological site, a ruin that would qualify for listing as a World Heritage site in the future. This talk questions the way planners thought about materials and human intentions from the perspective of an archaeological sensibility on how materials endure and decay and what people in the past expected would happen when they created the structures we recognize as monuments today.

About the Speaker:

Rosemary Joyce received the PhD from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985, based archaeological fieldwork in Caribbean Honduras. A curator and faculty member in anthropology at Harvard University from 1985 to 1994, she moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, initiating new archaeological fieldwork in Honduras on the emergence of settled farming villages before 1500 BC. This began her explorations of the liveliness of geological materials, and the intentions of people in the past when they built features today seen as monuments. She is the author of ten books, the latest The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us About Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material (2020, Oxford University Press).

February 5, 2021February 4, 2021

Design and Development of High Spatial Resolution Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Systems

SPEAKER:

Craig Levin

Professor of Radiology, and, by Courtesy, of Physics, Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, Stanford University

DATE/TIME:

FRI, 02/5/2021 - 3:00PM TO 4:00PM

LOCATION:

zoom

Spring 2021 Colloquium Series

Abstract:PET imaging employs positron-emitting radionuclides to visualize and quantify the biology and chemistry of disease in living subjects. There has been great interest to enhance the spatial resolution of PET imaging to be able to detect subtle signatures of disease, which can enable earlier disease detection and more sensitive monitoring of therapeutic strategies. PET imaging relies on detection and positioning of 511 keV annihilation photon pairs emitted from the imaging subject. In this talk we will describe technologies and techniques that are employed to achieve sub-millimeter spatial resolution.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Craig Levin is a Professor in the Department of Radiology with courtesy appointments in the Departments of Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering at Stanford University. He is a founding Member of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), and faculty member of the Stanford’s Bio-X Program, Cancer Institute, Cardiovascular Institute, and Neurosciences Institute. He is director and PI of the NIH-NCI funded Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholars (SMIS) post-doctoral training program, and Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Innovation in In Vivo Imaging (SCI^3). Dr. Levin’s also directs a 25-member research laboratory whose research interests are to explore new concepts in imaging instrumentation and computational algorithms for advancing our ability to visualize and quantify molecular and cellular pathways of disease in living subjects. To support this work he has received numerous grants from NIH, DOE, DOD, NSF, industrial sponsorship from companies such as GE, Siemens, and Philips, as well as research awards from numerous non-profit foundations. Dr. Levin has over 170 peer-reviewed publications and 26 awarded patents.

February 5, 2021February 9, 2021

Berkeley Team take first-ever measurements of Einsteinium

February 5th, 2021

Leticia Arnedo -Sanchez (from left), Katherine Shield, Korey Carter, Jennifer Wacker at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Tuesday, November 17, 2020 in Berkeley, Calif. 11/17/20

Researchers in Rebecca Abergel's lab obtained a small sample of einsteinium, a highly radioactive and difficult-to-obtain element, and made the first ever measurement of its bond distance. The study was published in Nature.

“Structural and Spectroscopic Characterization of an Einsteinium Complex,” has been published in Nature; A study co-led by Berkeley Lab scientist and UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering (UCBNE) Assistant Professor Rebecca Abergel, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Stosh Kozimor, and a team of scientists: study co-authors Korey Carter, Katherine Shield (current UCBNE Grad student), Kurt Smith, Leticia Arnedo-Sanchez, Tracy Mattox, Liane Moreau, and Corwin Booth of Berkeley Lab; Zachary Jones and Stosh Kozimor of Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Jennifer Wacker and Karah Knope of Georgetown University—several of whom are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science. Luminescence spectroscopy experiments were conducted at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab, and X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. With experimental facilities not available in 1952, when Einsteinium was discovered, the team measured the first-ever Einsteinium bond distance and with less than 250 nanograms of the element!

“There’s not much known about einsteinium,” said Abergel, who leads Berkeley Lab’s Heavy Element Chemistry group. “It’s a remarkable achievement that we were able to work with this small amount of material and do inorganic chemistry. It’s significant because the more we understand about its chemical behavior, the more we can apply this understanding for the development of new materials or new technologies, not necessarily just with einsteinium, but with the rest of the actinides too. And we can establish trends in the periodic table.”

Congratulations Professor Abergel and Kathy Shield! —from your UCBNE family.

More News coverage:

Nature

Chemistry world