News
Twelve students traveled to Prague as part of the inaugural Nuclear Digital Twin and Reactor Lab study abroad program, led by Senior Research Scientist Ondrej Chvala. Through hands-on research reactor training and classroom learning, students gained practical skills, real-world insights and professional perspectives that will benefit their future careers in the nuclear industry.
Chaired by Dale Klein, the board brings together leaders from national laboratories, industry, government agencies and the University to help guide the continued growth and strategic direction of the NRE program. The board will meet annually to advise on future priorities and provide an outside perspective on workforce needs, industry trends, research opportunities and educational priorities in the growing nuclear sector.
The Nuclear Engineering Teaching Laboratory (NETL) recently hosted the National Organization of Test, Research and Training Reactors (TRTR) Annual Conference, welcoming more than 150 nuclear professionals, researchers and students from across the country. The conference featured workshops, facility tours, networking opportunities, and nearly 60 papers and presentations spanning the full spectrum of research and test reactor operations, science and policy.
Jeongwon Seo and Sam Queralt won "Best Paper in Operations and Power" for their writing and presentation of "Efficiency Enhancement of Control Rod Worth Calibration in TRIGA Mk-II Reactor using Rod Swap Technique" at the ANS Student Conference in April. While current control rod calibration methods struggle to balance accuracy with efficiency, Rod Swap enables improvements in both. These new findings could be implemented at the university's own TRIGA reactor on the J. J. Pickle Research Campus. Until they are, this paper offers a new perspective on control rod worth calibration and invites further research in to improving the baseline operations of nuclear reactors.
More information can be found about control rod worth here: https://nuclear-twins.tacc.utexas.edu/rod_calibration
Dani Zigon, Director of Strategic Initiatives for UT Austin's Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program, delivered the opening keynote at Texas A&M's 2026 ReCENT Summit on April 28–29. The PowerUp program event brought approximately 500 middle and high school students to campus over two days for hands-on exposure to careers in clean energy and nuclear technology.
The Translational Radiological Advanced Imaging Laboratory (TRAIL) in the Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program within the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering has been awarded a R21 Trailblazer Award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will support the development of a novel, robot-assisted SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) imaging system, a project that seeks to redefine how high-resolution functional images of the human body are acquired.
Dr. Jeongwon Seo’s latest paper, "Validation performance assessment through quantitative score focused on benchmark selection for nuclear criticality safety," has been published in Nuclear Science and Technology Open Research. While traditional validation relies on heuristic similarity rules, Dr. Seo introduces a "Score" concept that normalizes prediction residuals by their associated uncertainty. This provides an uncertainty-aware lens to ensure that model predictions are statistically consistent rather than just numerically close.
Nuclear and Radiation Engineering graduate student Braden Pecora has been selected as the 2026–27 Kay Bailey Hutchison (KBH) Computational Energy Fellow, a joint fellowship from the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the KBH Energy Center at UT Austin.
The fellowship recognizes an outstanding Oden Institute graduate student or postdoctoral fellow who contributes computational science expertise to the educational programming of the KBH Energy Center's Energy Studies Minor.
Join the UT Nuclear Niche for an in-person fireside chat with Commissioner David Wright of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Use the QR code below or this link to register.
📍 Rowling 5.210
🗓 Tuesday, March 31, 2026
⏰ 1:30–3:00 PM
🍭 Light bites provided
Current PhD student Ivy Seidel published the peer-reviewed paper, Investigating nuclear energy viability in Texas with decision making model GenX, in the journal Energy Economics. This paper focuses on the analysis of the economic viability of Nuclear Power in Texas. Seidel utilized open source capacity expansion model GenX to weigh the cost of unserved energy against the cost of implementing nuclear power in the face of electricity demand growth Texas. ERCOT is expected to experience a dramatic increase in the number of data centers being constructed due to the favorable economic landscape of the state, this would greatly impact industrial power draw and need to be accounted for in the coming years. A sharp rise in power demand along with expected population growth is predicted to cause a near doubling of the average electricity demand in Texas by 2030.
