This year’s summer workshop in 2024 will take place at McMaster University and marks a collaboration between the NEST and SMART programs. This year, the event will merge both programs into a single, integrated workshop that allows participation from students of both programs. Structured over a span of five weeks, the workshop kicks off with pre-workshop virtual lectures held once a week, May 31 – June 17, 2024. These lectures are followed by mentor-led small group sessions, wherein students are organized into teams. The program culminates in an intensive in-person final week, June 24 – 28 where participants will engage in a full schedule of activities including lectures, hands-on training sessions at McMaster Nuclear Reactor, and off-campus technical tours, marking the end of the comprehensive five-week program.
Throughout the five weeks, the students’ teams will work together and apply their acquired knowledge to formulate a deployment plan for utilizing either a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) or a Microreactor. Each group will showcase its deployment plan on the last day of the fifth week, aiming to win in the 2024 pitch competition. Each student group will pick a town or location to explore its growth plans. They will begin by identifying a key business sector of interest to the area (such as data centers, mining, tourism, or metals processing). Following this, they will choose a reactor type and investigate why it is a viable option for the selected town, taking into account factors such as the public’s acceptability of nuclear energy, the connectivity of the town’s power grid or its absence, the appropriateness and availability of a site, logistical considerations in the supply chain, the necessity for process heat, the logistics of transporting nuclear materials through the area, and deciding between a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) or a Microreactor as the reactor type. Teams are encouraged to consider “Edge of the Grid” communities as likely options for their projects.
Stay tuned!
Todd Allen, University of Michigan
Dave Novog, McMaster University
Background
The NEST SMR program is an NEA program involving the EU, USA and Canada and is dedicated to the training and development of people for the upcoming SMR deployment phase.
The SMART program is a large training program looking to produce more well rounded and entrepreneurially focused grad students who can succeed in the competitive world of small SMR vendors. It involves six universities and 10 principal investigators and aims to train students to succeed in the new nuclear environment where many small companies co-exist instead of the historical model of one or two major industry players.