Category Archives: Information for Nuclear Students

Map of US Nuclear Weapons Complex

USNuclearComplexMap

The nuclear engineering department is moving buildings this week, and a found a copy of Closing the Circle on Splitting the Atom, a Dept. of Energy report about cleaning up the nuclear waste that was a legacy of the Cold War nuclear weapons program. I’m not sure where I received my copy: probably someone was discarding it in a previous move.

There was an interesting map in the document showing the weapons complex at that time (1996).  The problem was that it was poorly separated across two pages and in the electronic version the map does not appear contiguously (it is still split across two pages).

I have corrected this is and changed some of the text so that it is a standalone image.  I did not take the time to fix the appalling font kerning, maybe I will do this at some point in the future.

As someone who doesn’t remember the Cold War much (and the millions younger than me) it is hard to imagine the size of the weapons complex during the Cold War.  This map only shows the sites are were still active in 1996 and not the many other smaller sites that are only indicated by a single marker in the respective states.

A pdf version of the map is here

A larger jpeg version is here

Using tkz-graph to draw nuclear reaction networks

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The other day I was interested in drawing a fairly simple nuclear reaction network in$$\LaTeX$$.  I thought that tikz would be a good way of doing this. Basically, tikz is a way to generate vector graphics directly inside the $$\LaTeX$$ source code. I figured that somebody would have an example online of how to draw a simple directed graph with annotations on the connections.

There does exist a fairly new package called tkz-graph that is specifically designed for drawing such a graph. Unfortunately, there are some limitations that affected my final image.  One thing I wanted to do was color the nodes of the network with different colors to demonstrate different linear chains in the network, but that seems to be difficult with the current version as coloring nodes differently is not currently supported without defining a node type for each style.

The end result was pretty nice

Transmutation and decay network for uranium-238

Transmutation and decay network for uranium-238

This network could be much more involved insofar as there could be higher nuclides plutonium, but the point here is to illustrate how these networks can be draw in $$\LaTeX$$.

The code for this figure is given below, after the jump. Continue reading →

The 2014 Code-a-thon in pictures

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We’re still recovering from the 24 hours of coding that was the 2014 Nuclear engineering code-a-thon.  More on what happened and what we did later. For now I wanted to share with everyone the pictures I took of the event.  In the panoramic shots you might notice that some people don’t change position much, even when there is food.

First coffee at the code-a-thon

First coffee at the code-a-thon

 

Code-a-thon First Hour

Code-a-thon First Hour

Day 2 - Pizza Time

Day 2 – Pizza Time

Day 2 Mid-afternoon malaise

Day 2 Mid-afternoon malaise

Day 2: Two Hours to go

Day 2: Two Hours to go

 

 

 

So what do Nuclear Engineers Do?

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A fuel assembly for a nuclear reactor.

Good question and one I get all the time. The other links I’ve found on the internets do a good,  but dry, job describing what career paths are available to nuclear engineers. I get this question a lot from prospective students, so I thought I would jot down the answer here.

Before we begin it is important to remember that with many, if not all, degrees, the discipline helps define the career but does not cast the graduate into an ineluctable career path. How many English majors do you know that write books for a living.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that the typical career is dependent on what degree level we are talking about.  In most cases, when someone asks this question they want to know about a nuclear engineer with a bachelor’s degree, so that is where we will start after the jump.

Continue reading →