The University of Bristol recently hosted this year’s Universities’ Nuclear Technology Forum (UNTF). This is an annual conference designed to give PhD students, and early career researchers, in the nuclear sector the opportunity to present their work, perhaps for the first time, to their peers. Bangor University was well represented at this event, with six PhD students from the Nuclear Futures Institute presenting their work. This began on Thursday, 19th July 2023 with a presentation from India Marshall outlining how waste heat from nuclear facilities could be utilised to enhance food production in the UK. Later that day, Zola Hinds presented an overview of her PhD to explore smooth particle hydrodynamics for fuel performance modelling. This was quickly followed by Sarah Vallely’s talk about her work to investigate the sintering behaviour of chromium-doped uranium dioxide fuel.
The next day, following another morning of varied, fascinating and informative talks, more presentations were delivered by Bangor University’s PhD Students. Beginning with a discussion on boron free small modular reactor design and operation by Madinka Mweetwa, followed by a presentation by Harvey Plows describing how fibre Bragg gratings can be used to characterise multiphase flows in nuclear thermal hydraulic conditions. Finally, in the last talk of the session, Conor Buchanan explored the modelling of radionuclides for targeted Auger therapy. The work presented by these six PhD students clearly showcases the impressive breadth and depth of nuclear research capabilities developed by the NFI.
After the final PhD talks had been concluded, UNTF 2023 was then brought to a close by keynote speakers and presentations from professionals working within the nuclear sector. These included talks from Sellafield Ltd, Nuclear Waste Services and the University of Oxford.
Thank you to the staff and students of the University of Bristol, and the South West Nuclear Hub, for organising and hosting this enjoyable and educational conference.