PSW 2487 Nuclear Energy & Advanced Reactor Designs | Kathryn Huff

Lecture Starts at 14:08
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PSW #2487
December 15, 2023
Nuclear Energy & Advanced Reactor Designs
Kathryn Huff
Assistant Secretary, Office of Nuclear Energy
Department of Energy
Nuclear energy can play a role in the transition to a clean energy economy by fundamentally enabling the nation’s targets for clean, carbon-free electricity as well as non-electric energy markets. It has the potential to decarbonize many industrial sectors in the United States and abroad. For nuclear power to realize its potential to provide clean energy the nuclear power program and commercial nuclear will have to meet a number of challenges.
One of these is preservation of the existing fleet in the United States, which currently supplies a significant fraction of the Nation’s electricity. Another is the development and deployment of new advanced reactor types that will improve on the performance of the current fleet of conventional PWR reactors. Staging nuclear reactors and dealing with the remanent spent fuel has hindered development of nuclear power resources. Solving these challenges will require the development of consent-based siting processes for interim and then permanent spent nuclear fuel storage.
This lecture will discuss US Department of Energy nuclear power programs, especially the development of advanced reactor types, such as small modular nuclear reactors.
Kathryn Huff leads the Office of Nuclear Energy as the Assistant Secretary. Before joining the Department of Energy, she was a professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. She also was a member of the American Nuclear Society, where she was Chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division and of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division. And she has long been an advocate of best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing including leadership roles in such organizations as Software Carpentry, SciPy, Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open Source Software.
Her research is focused on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles.
Among other honors and awards Kathryn received the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement awards.
She earned a BS in Physics at the University of Chicago and a PhD in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing her PhD she was a postdoctoral fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley.
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