March 8, 2024
The UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering team had a strong showing at the annual Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) conference. Chris Reis, Ryan Hayes, Malachi Nelson, Darrin Parkinson, Kavin Ram, and Professor Peter Hosemann presented several talks and posters at the 2024 meeting in Orlando, Florida.
December 15, 2023
Last fall, a coalition of the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John F. Templeton Foundation and the Gordon & Betty Moore foundation pledged a fund of $30M total for a 'tabletop experiments' solicitation. It was just announced that a team of researchers led by UCBNE faculty Karl van Bibber will be awarded $3.7M in funding to continue research about axions, particles believed to make up dark matter in the universe. Collaborators on the project include researchers from eleven institutions: UC Berkeley, Yale, Colorado, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wellesley, ORNL, Stockholm, Iceland, ITMO/St. Petersburg and Cambridge. The experiment, “A Plasma Haloscope for the Post-Inflation Axion", will be sited at Yale, nearby the current HAYSTAC experiment, utilizing a large-bore 16 Tesla magnet. Berkeley's role is the development of metamaterial-based resonators for the conversion of dark matter axions into a very weak microwave signal, detectable with advanced quantum sensing techniques.
Learn more in the Simon Foundation announcement and the College of Engineering write-up.
December 12, 2023
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a construction permit to Kairos Power for the Hermes non-power demonstration reactor to be built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The demonstrator reactor is intended to provide operational data to support the development of a larger version for commercial power targeted in the early 2030s. The Hermes series aims to help mitigate technology, licensing, supply chain, and construction risk to achieve cost certainty for Kairos Power’s fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology.
UCBNE faculty Per Peterson is one of the co-founders of Kairos Power alongside UCBNE alumn Mike Laufer.
Read the Kairos Power write-up and NRC press release.
October 6, 2023
UCBNE alumni Andy Haefner and Ryan Pavlovsky, alongside professor Kai Vetter, have worked to develop and commercialize real-time, 3D radiation mapping instruments through their work at LBNL and startup Gamma Reality, Inc. Their scene-data fusion enabled instruments have been increasingly adopted by nuclear power plants across the US, Canada, and Switzerland.
Learn more about the creation of Gamma Reality, Inc. in the full DOE article, and the applications of its technologies in the full ANS article.
December 1st, 2022
UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering alum Joey Kabel (MS '17, PhD '20) has been named on the 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 - Energy list for his work with startup Electrified Thermal.
"At Electrified Thermal, Kabel is on a mission to decarbonize industry with renewable heat. The startup is building the Joule Hive thermal battery: an energy storage technology that converts and stores cheap, renewable electricity as high-temperature heat. Its patented technology revolutionizes the durability of affordable electric heating to deliver flame-temperatures to any process. It has raised $5.5 million in funding from government and venture capital sources since incorporating in April 2021." (Forbes)
September 8th, 2022
UCBNE Ph.D. candidate Sarah Stevenson has been selected for the 2023 ANS Glenn T. Seaborg Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship. For the first time in the history of the fellowship, two memebrs have been chosen, Stevenson alongside GE-Hitach Joseph Orellana.
Harsh S. Desai, chair of the ANS Congressional Fellowship Committee and a former Congressional Fellow says "With two Fellows on the Hill next year, ANS will be in a unique position to provide significant technical assistance to the U.S. Congress on nuclear science, energy, and technology . With the increased focus on clean energy deployment and ensuring domestic energy security in Washington, D.C., Stevenson and Orellana’s different perspectives from their industry, academia, and national lab experiences will be invaluable."
Further coverage can be found here.
April 14th, 2022
BloombergNEF has announced its twelve winners of the 2022 BNEF Pioneers program, including Department of Nuclear Engineering professor Per Peterson and alumni Mike Laufer and their team at Kairos Power. Kairos Power was recognized for its "novel advanced nuclear reactor technology to complement renewable energy sources". For over a decade, this program has sought to identify and highlight technological innovations that accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change.
You can read more about this achievement here.
April 6th, 2022
"Search for Majorana neutrinos exploiting millikelvin cryogenics with CUORE" has been published in Nature. The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE, Italian for “heart”) is one of several next generation neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ) experiments. Affilated with the published article include those from the UC Berkeley Department of Physics, the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Engineering Divison of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering.
The link to the article can be found here. And further coverage of the article can be found here.
February 9th, 2022
Raluca Scarlat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, heads the SALT Laboratory at University of California Berkeley, and is the recipient of the ANS Mary Jane Oestmann Award. Professor Scarlat has expertise in high temperature chemistry and materials for advanced reactors, reactor design and safety analysis, and engineering ethics.
February 11th, 2022
Across all divisions, the LANL postdocs went through a competitive process in order to be selected for the fellowship based on previous research merit and the strength of the postdoc research proposal.
Director Postdoc fellowship provides full, 2/3, 1/3 funding for each subsequent year to support Hi Vo's research proposal.
Hi Vo's Director funded research proposal is on the exploration of unit and collective plastic deformation processes using in situ 4DSTEM mechanical testing and 3D-EBSD.
Congratulations Hi Vo! What a wonderful achievement!
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