Annual Report

student Mark Mawdsley. Dominic Rhodes MBE
of NNL also lent his expertise. Their efforts in
devising the exhibits, setting them up, and operating
and explaining them to audiences were
instrumental in making the CNE stand a prime
attraction and contributed more broadly to the
success of the Imperial Festival.
Bhaba Atomic Research Centre
During the week June 15th 2015 research associate
Dr Navatnarajah Kuganathan and PhD student
Conor Galvin visited the Bhabha Atomic
Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, India.
They were given a tour of the site and saw the
wide variety of research and work conducted at
BARC, from medical isotope production to the
BARC: from left-to right, CNE PhD student Conor Galvin
and PDRA Dr Navaratnarajah Kuganathan with their
hosts Dr Ashok Arya and Mr. Partha Sarathi Ghosh at
the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre near Mumbai in
India.
nuclear energy sector. As thorium is a potentially
valuable resource for India, considerable
research has been done on the topic.
While at BARC, Dr Kuganathan presented his
work on ‘Theoretical Simulations of Carbon
Nano Materials, Cathode for Lithium Ion Batteries
and Inorganic Electrides’ in the Materials
Science Division Seminar room. The talk
was received extremely well, with around fifty
researchers from various disciplines attending.
Overall, the trip was a great success and
strengthened the existing bonds between CNE
and BARC.
Fukushima Visit
In March 2011, an earthquake off the east coast
of Japan triggered a tsunami, which crashed
into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. This
led to explosions and a partial meltdown of
three boiling water reactors and the mass evacuation
by authorities of citizens living in the
surrounding area. In March 2015, Professor Bill
Lee, Director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering
at Imperial, and PhD student Dimitri Pletser,
also from the Centre, visited the clean-up
operations. Since the accident, water has been
used to cool the damaged cores. The site visit
was part of Professor Lee’s and Mr Pletser’s
research to develop ways of capturing and disposing
of radioactive waste collected from the
cooling water.
Prof Bill Lee offers some reflections on the lessons
the UK and the global nuclear community
can learn from the incident: ‘It must be remembered
that Fukushima was, according to the Japanese
Parliament Review, an “accident made in
Japan”’. ‘It should never have happened’, Bill
states, ‘and had Japan followed the same ap-
85 http://www.imperial.ac.uk/nuclear-engineering