News

Ruth and Joel Spira Awards are given annually to four faculty members in the areas of electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, and nuclear science and engineering to acknowledge “the tradition of high-quality engineering education at MIT”.

Forty-four NSE students graduate this year in the MIT’s commencement ceremony on May 29th.

Allium Engineering, founded by Sam McAlpine PhD ’22 and Steven Jepeal PhD ’21), developed a process for improving steel rebar to triple the lifetime of bridges and other infrastructure

NSE and the student chapter of the American Nuclear Society hosted their annual awards dinner on May 13, 2025

The MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering hosted its annual Research Expo on April 11, 2025. The event featured poster presentations by 21 students and oral presentations by three graduate students.

NSE graduate student Sara Hauptman, won the Best Student Presentation Award at the European Research Reactor Conference (RRFM) for her poster, entitled “Exploring MITR-III Alternative Reactivity Control Systems to Eliminate Axial Flux Skewing”.

Dennis Whyte, a leader in fusion research, shares how MIT’s fusion program has started the move from the lab to market, and explains how unlocking commercial fusion could be a gamechanger for our energy system.

A new international collaboration unites MIT and maritime industry leaders to develop nuclear propulsion technologies, alternative fuels, data-powered strategies for operation, and more. The consortium brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear scientist at MIT, argues that you can’t get to a robust clean energy portfolio without nuclear and we have learned a lot more about making nuclear power safer. He provides a run-down of the benefits and risks associated with nuclear and the role it plays in achieving a clean energy mix.

New experiments show that the immediate effect of atomic displacements, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during fusion power plant operations.