Graduates: Welcome to Nuclear Engineering

North Carolina State University was the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering education program. Today the Department of Nuclear Engineering continues to be a dynamic and growing one, evolving with the nuclear industry and national laboratory programs. Our graduate faculty has grown recently to 12 full-time professors plus adjunct and emeritus faculty who have varied research interests supported by industry, national laboratories, and government. Details concerning each professors interests are presented in this brochure. The general technical areas emphasized in the Departments graduate education program are fission reactor technology, plasma/fusion engineering, radiation applications, and radiological engineering.

Our department has over 50 graduate students taking courses and working with the faculty on research projects, and a support staff of about 20 technical and administrative personnel. We are operating our fourth nuclear fission reactor since the nuclear engineering program began in 1951, a 1-MW PULSTAR reactor used for laboratory experiments, research, operator training, and services such as activation analysis and radiography. Another unique facility is the Scaled PWR Facility, a 1/9 - scale functional model of a pressurized water reactor, operating with electric heaters as the core and freon as the coolant, that is also used for teaching, research, and training. Other major facilities are listed and described in this brochure. Our computer facilities range from workstations and microcomputers on the College of Engineering EOS network system to a local area network of graphics terminals and workstations connected to departmental servers and to IBM and Cray mainframes in the University computing system. Many of these facilities are supported by our two research centers, the Electric Power Research Center (EPRC) and the Center for Engineering Applications of Radioisotopes (CEAR).

We work closely with the nuclear industry and national laboratories through a departmental Industrial Advisory Committee, our two research centers, and our Nuclear Engineering Graduate Traineeship Program. Also, we participate in several national fellowship programs (DOE fission, fusion, computational sciences, waste management, etc.). One of our faculty members is program coordinator for the NCSU Computational Engineering and Sciences Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program that provides a minor field of study for our students.

We welcome your interest in our Department and believe you will find a challenging but congenial intellectual environment among our faculty and students. Please contact our Director of Graduate Programs, Dr. K.L. Murty , or our Director of Outreach Programs, Ms. Lisa Marshall, to arrange a visit or to obtain information about our department and graduate program. I look forward to your joining our university community.