Last edited Tue Dec 2, 2025, 11:03 AM - Edit history (1)
...nuclear engineering.
Professionally chiefly I have focused, as a chemist, originally on the organic but later, the analytical chemistry, of pharmaceuticals.
A private interest is in environmental chemistry.
My interest in environmental chemistry drove me, for the last roughly 40 years, since Chernobyl blew up, to a very detailed way, to study the chemistry of used nuclear fuels, and ultimately, to an understanding of reactor engineering.
My son is a materials guy, and his focus as a nuclear engineer has been in the all important subject of nuclear materials.
I can certainly hold my own with him on many topics reactor engineering, and in fact, am in the process of writing up some ideas for him to keep in his back pocket when he becomes a professional or academic engineer. I have discussed these verbally with him, and he finds them credible. They concern transplutonium actinides and aspects of addressing issues connected with reduced fractions of delayed neutrons in certain of these actinide isotopes in fuel settings, related effects on criticality, passive heat removal and passive neutronic control and the neutron dynamics of certain fission product isotopes.
(I think these ideal are novel, but often when I think that, I found out that my presumed novelty is over stated.)
But yes, his topic is one out of my purview generally, radiation hardening of certain classes of alloys.
(His advisory team has advised him to narrow his focus. I told him to keep the refractory thermal parts he'll be cutting from the thesis in his back pocket; he'll need them ultimately, as he acknowledged. We had a laugh over the fact that is thesis will concern pressurized water reactors, an important topic, but one very limited in scope. If the world, or what's left of it, is to be saved we'll need to go way beyond PWRs, something of which he is very aware.)
Of course, the reason he's a nuclear engineer has something, not everything, to do with his father's interests expressed when he was a child and young man.
His undergraduate degree is in materials science and he did a one year masters in metallurgy on the advice of his undergraduate faculty, before going into nuclear engineering.
One pleasure I've had with him this weekend is to joke with him about fusion reactors. He has friends who know they won't be practical in their lifetimes, but took the jobs anyway, because of all the money flowing in. Perhaps it's a little unethical to take the money and run, but one has to live.
Congrats on your daughter's success.
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