NuMat 2014

From 27–30^th October, 350 delegates, from over 30 countries, gathered at the Hilton hotel in Clearwater, FL for NuMAT 14.

This was the third NuMat, The Nuclear materials Conference in the series, which started in 2010 in Karlruhe, initiated collaboratively between Elsevier and Dr Rudy Konings, Head of Unit of Material Research at the European Commisions Joint Research Center’s Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), who was at the time of the editors of the Journal of Nuclear Materials.

Reaching far beyond the traditional, strict definition of nuclear materials (i.e. U, Pu), the journal has been a home for all aspects of research focused on materials used in nuclear power generation, from fuel to structural materials used in fission and fusion reactors, ever since its inception in the 1950’s.

This year’s conference chairs were Prof. Todd Allen, Drs Rory Kennedy and Jim Cole from Idaho National Laboratory, and they did a great job attracting world-class presenters, and the concensus was that the level of presentations was very high. After the opening by the chairs and Dr Louis Mansur, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Chairman of the editors of Journal of Nuclear Materials, delegates had the chance to assist, over the following four days, to 8 plenary lectures, more than 140 oral presentations and two poster sessions.

The Robert Cahn Award, which recognizes a lifelong contribution to the field of nuclear materials, and usually given at the conference alongside a plenary lecture, went to Dr. Claudio Ronchi, in recognition for his lifetime of outstanding contributions to nuclear materials research, in particular to nuclear fuels and uranium oxide. Dr Ronchi could not join due to health issues, but the recording of his lecture that we organized earlier this year, was broadcasted in the theater and can be seen here.

A few other awards were given:

• the first Best Article Award, which was selected by the editors of the Journal of Nuclear Materials within a list of highly downloaded and cited articles published in the years leading to the next NuMAT conference, was attributed to Dr Christine Guéneau from CEA ( Saclay, France) for her work on the thermodynamics of nuclear fuels. Dr Guéneau was invited to give the closing plenary lecture at the conference.
• The Best Reviewer Award, a newly introduced award for outstanding reviewers chosen by the Editors of the Journal of Nuclear Materials was given to Prof. Peter Hosemann from the Department of Nuclear Engineering of the University of California at Berkeley
• The Early-Career Scientist Award was attributed, by decision of a committee and the chairs, to Dr Leah Broussard from Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA)  for her work on the use of ultracold neutrons to investigate nuclear fuel
• And finally, Best Poster Awards went to Yinbin Miao (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) for his poster Advanced investigations on the strengthening mechanisms in austenitic ODS stainless steels and Jonathan Solomon (UC Berkeley) for his poster entitled Computational study of the energetics and defect-ordering tendencies for rare-earth elements in uranium dioxide

Although the star of the conference was the science, we also had the chance to have a real television star with us, Dr Marius Stan, from Argonne National Laboratory who is most famous for his role Bogdan Wolynetz in the television series Breaking Bad!

We are very grateful to all our sponsors for this event, Netzsch, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Westinghouse, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Thermocalc, Terrapower, The American Nuclear Society Materials Science and Technology division, Argonne National Laboratory and Transatomic Power

We are very proud of the way things went and we hope to see more delegates come in Montpellier in November 2016!