'Understanding Tomorrow's Nuclear Energy' lecture series continues in January, registration open

Purdue University and Duke Energy will host the next installment of the Understanding Tomorrow’s Nuclear Energy Lecture Series in January. Kathryn D. Huff, assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, will present “Nuclear Power in 2050” from 3:30-4:30 p.m. ET on Jan. 18 in Stewart Center’s Fowler Hall and via livestream. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. 

In this talk, Huff will provide a potential vision for the future of nuclear power globally and will describe what the federal government, particularly the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE NE), is doing today to bring that vision into reality by 2050. This includes laying the groundwork for peaceful nuclear power to help the U.S. reach net-zero emissions by 2050, securing and sustaining both the front and back ends of our nuclear fuel cycle, and expanding international nuclear energy cooperation. 

This talk will highlight the DOE NE mission, vision and programs contributing to these goals as well as the opportunities and challenges ahead. These challenges and opportunities include a need to mobilize bold private-capital investments, scale up a skilled workforce, revive and invent critical supply chains, and underpin it all with processes and policies that consider equity and justice.

More about Assistant Secretary Huff 

Before joining the DOE, Huff was an assistant 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 was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2013 and her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Chicago. Her research focused on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles.

She is an active member of the American Nuclear Society as the past chair of both the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division and the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and she was the recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, The Hacker Within and the Journal of Open Source Software, she also advocates for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.

Purdue University and Duke Energy are jointly exploring the feasibility of using advanced nuclear energy to meet the West Lafayette campus community’s long-term energy needs. The study is focused on whether power produced through Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could be a potential fit for Purdue’s energy needs. More information about the study and the lecture series is available at https://bit.ly/advanced-nuclear.