NC State’s Young Investigators’ Summer Program in Nuclear Engineering had eighteen (18) students from North Carolina, Maine, Florida, New Jersey, Kentucky, Virginia and China participate this July 2018. Our international student, Haoxaun Yu, is a rising high school senior, and attends Wycombe Abbey International School in Changzhou located in the province of Jiangsu, China. Haoxaun developed interests for advanced reactors and high temperature plasmas early on and expressed delight as he explored these and other topics in the program.
Over the three-week residential period students took part in lectures, labs, projects and industrial field trips. Group projects included work in the areas of radiation monitoring, light sensitive monitors for the PULSTAR research reactor and nuclear materials. Lectures were given by faculty, professional staff and post-doctoral students on such topics as fission power systems, computational fluid dynamics, environmental assessment and applications in nuclear medicine, to name a few.
Popular was the seminar on the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) by Dr. Robert Hayes, Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering. His project this year was entitled “Characterizing Radioactive Emission from Common Items Using Small Modular Radiation Detectors”. Hayes is a member of the Consortium on Nonproliferation Enabling Capabilities (CNEC) and holds a joint appointment with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Ms. Lisa Marshall, Director of Outreach (& the program director for the Young Investigators’ Summer Program) also lectured on the US energy plan, nonproliferation initiatives and nuclear engineering education. The closing ceremony was held on Friday, July 27 in McKimmon Center. Students presented their projects to project mentors, parents and family friends. Doctoral candidate, Vincent Di Nova, served as this year’s guest speaker.
The Young Investigators’ Summer Program (YISP) thanks faculty, staff, university students and corporate contributors (e.g. Duke Energy, Framatome, and PetNet Solutions) for their time and effort. Students come away with a multifaceted examination of what nuclear science and technology has to offer and are more informed about engineering education especially nuclear.