Haruko Wainwright is an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received MA in statistics, and PhD in nuclear engineering from University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining MIT, she was a staff scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research focuses on environmental modeling and monitoring technologies, with a particular emphasis on nuclear waste and nuclear-related contamination.
Long-term environmental monitoring is critical to ensuring public safety and combating misinformation at contaminated sites. Climate change poses additional concerns since extreme weather could remobilize residual contaminants. We are developing a new paradigm of environmental monitoring by integrating state-of-the-art technologies: in situ sensors, geophysics, remote sensing, contaminant/radionuclide transport simulations and machine learning.
Geological disposal is required to isolate nuclear waste for thousands of years. Performance assessment models need to address large uncertainty associated with geological heterogeneity and future climate. At the same time, the existing contamination from waste disposal in the 1940s –1980s provides significant insights on radionuclide mobility and datasets for model validation. We are developing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods, including global sensitivity analysis, Bayesian parameter estimation, surrogate modeling, and experiment-to-model UQ pipelines with radionuclide transport simulations. In parallel, we have been developing comparative analysis methodologies for quantifying the environmental impacts of nuclear waste, advanced reactor waste and other energy waste.
22.78 Nuclear Energy and Environment
22.51 Nuclear Fuel Cycle
22.15 Introduction to Numerical Methods