Summer Internships
Heather Connaway
Summer 2011 I had the opportunity to work as a research aide at Argonne National Laboratory, under the mentorship of Dr. T. K. Kim, the manager of the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Analysis group. My focus was on evaluating (from a fuel cycle standpoint) some of the advanced reactor options that the United States can pursue in the coming century, as we transition away from older generation LWRs. I computed and analyzed the benefits of each of the potential fuel cycle paths from the standpoint of large-impact parameters like total uranium utilization and net waste produced.
Mark Reed
This past summer I worked at TerraPower (www.terrapower.com), a nuclear startup company developing the innovative Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR) technology for commercial deployment. I spent three months performing reactor physics analysis of the TWR core and learned far more than I had in any other internship. Nuclear startups are not common, and so this was a very unique opportunity to be part of a fast-paced nuclear (no, that's not an oxymoron) work environment.
Lindsey Gilman
This summer I participated in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computational Physics Student Workshop. The workshop involved 18 students, and included conducting research with a scientist at LANL while attending daily lectures. The lecture material covered modeling of multi-material mixing, electromagnetic pulse simulations, hyper-velocity deformation of solids, plasma fluid dynamics at extreme conditions, and other general computational physics topics. I worked on the research team under Dr.
Summer Internships Section Under Construction
As students come back from their internships we are asking them to write a summary of their experience. These will be up soon, stay tuned!