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Women at MIT have been impacting their fields since Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman graduate of MIT, was appointed chemistry instructor in 1882. Richards was an industrial and environmental chemist who established the Woman’s Laboratory in 1876 to create better opportunities for the scientific education of women, opening future opportunities at MIT and beyond.

Masashi Hirose was a high-schooler in Nagoya, Japan, when he first picked up a book about quantum physics. Most of the scientific phenomena he knew about until then seemed to have been studied thoroughly and were well-established entities. But quantum, with concepts...

An analysis of the 2011 nuclear accident reveals a need for more preparation, training, and protocols for responding to low-probability accidents.

NSE’s Associate Professor Michael Short and postdoc Dr. Weiyue Zhou have demonstrated that proton irradiation decreases the rate of corrosion in certain metal alloys. This is potentially good news for designers and builders of promising nuclear power reactors that rely on molten salts, which tend to be highly corrosive.

Experts in energy systems modeling and fusion technology explore the future role of fusion at various costs and carbon constraints.

MIT spinout Electrified Thermal Solutions, co-founded by NSE alum Dan Stack, has developed an electrically conductive firebrick that stores heat at high enough temperatures to power industrial processes.

John Kelly PhD ’80 passed away at the age of 70 on October 3, 2024. His groundbreaking career spanned over forty years. His tenure at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque NM, where he focused on safety and severe accident analysis was followed by service as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Nuclear Reactor Technologies at the U.S. Department of Energy. Kelly played a critical role in shaping nuclear policy and guiding the world through significant events, including the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan. His leadership and expertise were vital to shaping a safer, more advanced nuclear future for the global community.

The company has announced that it will build the first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The concept for a fusion power plant evolvved out of a design class taught by NSE’s Prof Dennis Whyte in 2012. Whyte challenged the graduate students to design a fusion device that would use a new kind of superconducting magnet to confine the plasma used in the reaction.

The decarbonization of the economy over the next few decades requires the massive deployment of clean energy sources. While nuclear power is a low-carbon, dispatchable, and sustainable source of electricity generation, the size and complexity of large traditional reactors hinder the rapid...

The approach, developed by NSE’s Mingda Li and a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere, could help engineers design more efficient energy-conversion systems and faster microelectronic devices, reducing waste heat.