Annual Report

Sam delivered his third and final lecture to the
Materials Society of Cumbria. The society is an
affiliate of IOM 3 , and is mainly formed of James
Walker, Sellafield, and NNL employees. At the
evening lecture he gave a short overview of the
CNE, followed by a more technical overview of
his work on plasma-facing fusion reactor materials.
Imperial Festival
In May 2015 Imperial College hosted its fourth
annual science festival, which aims to show to
the general public in a user-friendly way the
depth and variety of the work going within the
College’s faculties.
The CNE’s stand attracted a significant amount
of attention from the 12,000 visitors that attended
the festival, including Imperial’s President
Prof Alice Gast. The stand exhibited various
aspects of nuclear energy, such as uranium
Imperial Festival 2015: Dominic Rhodes from the
National Nuclear Laboratory explains how Muon
tomography was used to image core relocation at
Fukushima by using wavelength shifting fibre optics
(bottom).
glass and fuel rods. A real highlight was AWEsponsored
PhD student Ben Nash’s hot cell
simulator, which enabled visitors to experience
(virtually!) decommissioning operations. Although
aimed at all ages, younger visitors particularly
enjoyed having to find a uranium bearing
glass beads using ultra-violet light.
Imperial Festival 2015: a visitor to the CNE stand
has a go at decommissioning the core of Imperial’s
CONSORT reactor using the hot-cell virtual reality
simulator developed by PhD student Ben Nash.
CNE volunteers included CNE Manager Emma
Warriss, academics Mike Bluck and Ben Britton,
PDRA Michael Rushton, PhD students Dimitri
Pletser and Claudia Gasparinni, and CDT
Centre for Nuclear Engineering Annual Report 2014-2016 84