- Email: [email protected]
The Science of Nuclear Materials: A Modular, Laboratory-based Curriculum
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Nuclear Data Sheets 120 (2014) 163–165 www.elsevier.com/locate/nds
The Science of Nuclear Materials: A Modular, Laboratory-based Curriculum C.L. Cahill,1, ∗ G. Feldman,2 and W.J. Briscoe2 1
Department of Chemistry and Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA 2 Department of Physics,The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA The development of a curriculum for nuclear materials courses targeting students pursuing Master of Arts degrees at The George Washington University is described. The courses include basic concepts such as radiation and radioactivity as well as more complex topics such the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear weapons, radiation detection and technological aspects of non-proliferation. I.
INTRODUCTION
Fundamental communication gaps exist between various scientific/technical disciplines and policy constituents in a number of arenas. Policy professionals often lack a fundamental understanding of basic scientific principles that may be key to developing positions on issues with global implications. Scientists and engineers, on the other hand, often lack a global perspective or context of the implications of their efforts. This communication gap is particularly pronounced in the energy arena, where complex considerations beyond strictly technical or scientific issues come into play, including environmental, economic and sociological implications. Nuclear energy is exemplary in this regard and has an added layer of complexity considering the inherent link between the current nuclear fuel cycle and concerns related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the dialog of the latter continues to evolve in recent years from a means of negotiating between state actors to include security risks inherent to the former. This state of affairs was not true a generation ago. As such, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and policy professionals at The George Washington University (GW) has been developing a curriculum of nuclear materials courses specifically designed to instill a modest level of technical literacy within non-technical individuals. II.
COURSE DEVELOPMENT AND CONTENT
The motivation for this curriculum development effort may be appreciated by looking generally at The George Washington University and particularly at the El-
∗
Corresponding author: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nds.2014.07.035 0090-3752/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
liott School of International Affairs (ESIA), where there is a long history of educating policy professionals. Indeed, the ESIA has a recognized MA program in International Affairs with a degree track in Security Policy Studies. Within this sub-discipline, students explore different security challenges facing the world at present, including weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in particular. Current ESIA courses include such offerings as “Proliferation and Non-Proliferation,” “Nuclear Weapons,” and “New Proliferation Dynamics.” These courses are inherently non-technical and instead tend to focus on the implications of U.S. policy (as well as others) on nuclear weapons, the nuclear fuel cycle and the emerging threats of non-state actors. The target audience for these courses is MA students either currently working within the nuclear policy arena or those with aspirations to do so. Efforts to incorporate technical content into these courses began about two years ago, where Prof. Cahill would deliver a “Nuke 101” lecture on one class day each semester to introduce some basics of radiation, the nuclear fuel cycle, and weapons production. The response to this one-off lecture each semester was quite positive, and it quickly became clear that there was not only a demand for more technical information, but also a captive audience, namely the Security Policy Studies students; this led us to consider developing a stand-alone course. With this in mind, we began considering how to expand the content to a full year and at the same time responded to a call from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for curriculum development proposals. Our submitted proposal was successful and a two-year funding period began in January 2012. We had the official roll out of our course entitled “The Science of Nuclear Materials” in the following fall semester, with a course listing of IAFF 6186 in ESIA. The original intent of our efforts was to develop a modular, one-year course based on two meetings per
The Science of Nuclear Materials . . .
NUCLEAR DATA SHEETS
C. L. Cahill et al.
tal flight. Moreover, we invited GW’s Radiation Safety Officer to address the class and say a few words about radiation safety. The end result from this initial exercise was that the students were excited to carry out the experimental activities, were confident in handling the laboratory equipment, and were not fearful of the radioactive materials after some rational calculations.
week, dedicated to one lecture and one laboratory session. The first semester would emphasize two specific modules: technical treatments of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Nuclear Proliferation. The following semester would then focus on Materials Control and Accounting along with Environmental Health and Safety. At this point, we have successfully implemented the first part of these efforts, and we provide the details below. To begin, “The Science of Nuclear Materials” (referred to as SNM hereafter) needed to adjust its scope to respond to the culture and scheduling requirements of ESIA. Specifically, working professionals are accustomed to meeting only once per week in the evening. The thinking in this community is that classroom time actually constitutes a less significant portion of a student’s commitment to the course than perhaps those of us in the sciences generally expect. Instead, more substantial evaluative products such as term papers are the norm. As a consequence, we had to redesign our syllabus to conform to a single two-hour meeting per week over the 14week period of the semester. The first hour was devoted to lecture and the second hour consisted of a hands-on laboratory-based experimental portion designed to reinforce the content of the lectures. Specific topics for each week included radiation basics, the structure of the atom, half-lives, criticality and enrichment, fission reactions and yields. Six lectures on the nuclear fuel cycle in the latter half of the semester covered reactor types, operations, waste, reprocessing and accidents. Laboratory experiments were aimed particularly at reinforcing the lecture content and promoting a basic literacy of how, for example, radiation is measured and radioactivity is detected. We emphasized the use of standard equipment such as Geiger counters and multichannel analyzers and used a number of “off the shelf” experiments supplied with the Intermediate and Advanced Nuclear Laboratory kits from PASCO. These kits included “canned” experiments which we modified somewhat to match the level of our students and the language and context of our lecture material. Experimental topics included half-life determination (long-lived and shortlived isotopes), identification of daughters in the uranium decay chain, and effects of distance and shielding in radiation detection. A few lab activities did not involve equipment use and instead were guided inquiry projects where relevant problems were solved as a group. The latter included analysis of heat evolution in Fukushima’s spent fuel pools after the 2011 accident. Special mention should be made of the semester’s first laboratory meeting at which the exercise was to determine dose rates from some common radioactive objects, including Fiestaware, lantern mantles, and samples of uranium ore. At first, the students were rather leery of handling such materials, and the initial meeting was thus designed to dispel some myths about radiation. In that regard, we designed the experiments so that the students would compare the dose rates from these objects (at a fixed distance) to that received during a transcontinen-
III.
TEXTS AND READINGS
Several texts were used for this course: 1. “Megawatts and Megatons” by Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-375-40394-9; 2. “The World University Primer: Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century,” 2nd Edition, by Ian Hore-Lacy, ISBN 0-955-07841-5; 3. “Bluebells and Nuclear Energy” by Albert B. Reynolds, Cogito Books, ISBN 0-944-83863-4; 4. “Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Charles D. Ferguson, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-75946-0. The first three texts were required, and readings were assigned to support the lecture content. These were further supplemented with references to Wikipedia pages and popular literature when appropriate. The fourth text was recommended and served as a good introduction to a number of weapons and fuel cycle issues that were later treated at a more advanced level. IV.
EVALUATIVE PRODUCTS
A range of evaluative products was required including weekly homework assignments (12.5%), lab reports (12.5%), two mid-term exams (37.5%) and a term paper (37.5%). The weekly homework assignments emphasized developing math skills by way of dimensional analysis, conversion between units of radiation, binding energy calculations, fission yields, criticality calculations, half-lives, fuel burn-up compositions and decay heat calculations relating to spent nuclear fuel pools. Students reported that they typically spent four hours per week on homework assignments. A final term paper was required at the end of the semester and served a number of purposes. The MA students in ESIA are typically accustomed to significant research and writing assignments and are generally rather adept in this area. As such, it was decided to give the students an opportunity to get back into their “comfort zones” and take on a major writing assignment that would allow them to incorporate some of the technical knowledge and skills that they had acquired throughout the semester - this was the rationale for the relatively heavy weighting of this assignment. Some term paper 164
The Science of Nuclear Materials . . .
NUCLEAR DATA SHEETS
the most profound comment came from a student that stated “As a policy person I’ve found that the engineers I work with already respect me more due to my increased technical literacy.” Beyond these impressions however, a course evaluation was conducted by ESIA staff (independent of our own inquiries) and followed a format standard for all of their classes. From this survey, 92% of the respondents claimed to have “learned a great deal,” 69% were “very challenged” when it came to the level of intellectual challenge in the course, 77% were “very engaged” in the subject matter, and 68% said “A great deal” when asked about increased conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Looking ahead, we intend to offer the “Science of Nuclear Materials” course again in the Fall 2013 semester. This will then be followed by the second part, the “Nuclear Forensics” course, to be prepared for delivery in Spring 2014. The latter will cover the remaining two modules proposed in our original NRC submission: Materials Control and Accounting and Environmental Health and Safety. Going forward, these two courses will constitute a one-year sequence, with the “Science of Nuclear Materials” serving as a pre-requisite for the “Nuclear Forensics” course. In a more general sense, we anticipate these efforts to be the precursors of many opportunities for the technical and non-technical communities to engage at GW and beyond.
topics were suggested, but most students chose issues relevant to their particular interests or areas of employment. The primary criterion for the assignment was that the paper was not to be an analysis of policy, but rather a technical or “science first” paper. Students were encouraged to highlight technical challenges that may form the foundation of policy issues or opportunities within the nuclear arena, but they were discouraged from performing a strict policy analysis. This was achieved rather satisfactorily (after some dialog with the instructors) and topics included alternative fuel cycles, reprocessing, breeder reactors, fusion energy, nuclear submarines, the Megatons to Megawatts program, proliferation issues related to nuclear submarines, nuclear forensics, laser enrichment techniques and small modular reactors. V.
DEMOGRAPHICS
A total of 21 students enrolled in the inaugural offering of SNM during the Fall 2012 semester, 15 of whom were MA candidates in ESIA. Of these, only two had taken a college-level science course. Most of the students were already employed in the nuclear arena or had aspirations to do so in the future. Employers included NNSA, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Partnership for Global Security, the U.S. Department of State and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Among the other six students, a few were alumni auditors and a few were Ph.D. students in Chemistry. VI.
C. L. Cahill et al.
Acknowledgements: Financial support for this project was provided by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Award # NRC-HQ-11-G-38-0081). The authors are grateful to the following GW faculty and staff for valuable contributions: 1) Prof. Douglas Shaw, Associate Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, for useful discussions and technical support; 2) Mr. Daniel Hibbing, Radiation Safety Officer, for technical assistance, and 3) Prof. Philippe Bardet, faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for assistance with curriculum content.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In general, we view this initial effort as a success. Students have commented that they were inspired by the material and were far less apprehensive than they originally assumed they would be with technical content. Perhaps
165
Nuclear Data Sheets 120 (2014) 163–165 www.elsevier.com/locate/nds
The Science of Nuclear Materials: A Modular, Laboratory-based Curriculum C.L. Cahill,1, ∗ G. Feldman,2 and W.J. Briscoe2 1
Department of Chemistry and Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA 2 Department of Physics,The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA The development of a curriculum for nuclear materials courses targeting students pursuing Master of Arts degrees at The George Washington University is described. The courses include basic concepts such as radiation and radioactivity as well as more complex topics such the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear weapons, radiation detection and technological aspects of non-proliferation. I.
INTRODUCTION
Fundamental communication gaps exist between various scientific/technical disciplines and policy constituents in a number of arenas. Policy professionals often lack a fundamental understanding of basic scientific principles that may be key to developing positions on issues with global implications. Scientists and engineers, on the other hand, often lack a global perspective or context of the implications of their efforts. This communication gap is particularly pronounced in the energy arena, where complex considerations beyond strictly technical or scientific issues come into play, including environmental, economic and sociological implications. Nuclear energy is exemplary in this regard and has an added layer of complexity considering the inherent link between the current nuclear fuel cycle and concerns related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the dialog of the latter continues to evolve in recent years from a means of negotiating between state actors to include security risks inherent to the former. This state of affairs was not true a generation ago. As such, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and policy professionals at The George Washington University (GW) has been developing a curriculum of nuclear materials courses specifically designed to instill a modest level of technical literacy within non-technical individuals. II.
COURSE DEVELOPMENT AND CONTENT
The motivation for this curriculum development effort may be appreciated by looking generally at The George Washington University and particularly at the El-
∗
Corresponding author: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nds.2014.07.035 0090-3752/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
liott School of International Affairs (ESIA), where there is a long history of educating policy professionals. Indeed, the ESIA has a recognized MA program in International Affairs with a degree track in Security Policy Studies. Within this sub-discipline, students explore different security challenges facing the world at present, including weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in particular. Current ESIA courses include such offerings as “Proliferation and Non-Proliferation,” “Nuclear Weapons,” and “New Proliferation Dynamics.” These courses are inherently non-technical and instead tend to focus on the implications of U.S. policy (as well as others) on nuclear weapons, the nuclear fuel cycle and the emerging threats of non-state actors. The target audience for these courses is MA students either currently working within the nuclear policy arena or those with aspirations to do so. Efforts to incorporate technical content into these courses began about two years ago, where Prof. Cahill would deliver a “Nuke 101” lecture on one class day each semester to introduce some basics of radiation, the nuclear fuel cycle, and weapons production. The response to this one-off lecture each semester was quite positive, and it quickly became clear that there was not only a demand for more technical information, but also a captive audience, namely the Security Policy Studies students; this led us to consider developing a stand-alone course. With this in mind, we began considering how to expand the content to a full year and at the same time responded to a call from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for curriculum development proposals. Our submitted proposal was successful and a two-year funding period began in January 2012. We had the official roll out of our course entitled “The Science of Nuclear Materials” in the following fall semester, with a course listing of IAFF 6186 in ESIA. The original intent of our efforts was to develop a modular, one-year course based on two meetings per
The Science of Nuclear Materials . . .
NUCLEAR DATA SHEETS
C. L. Cahill et al.
tal flight. Moreover, we invited GW’s Radiation Safety Officer to address the class and say a few words about radiation safety. The end result from this initial exercise was that the students were excited to carry out the experimental activities, were confident in handling the laboratory equipment, and were not fearful of the radioactive materials after some rational calculations.
week, dedicated to one lecture and one laboratory session. The first semester would emphasize two specific modules: technical treatments of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Nuclear Proliferation. The following semester would then focus on Materials Control and Accounting along with Environmental Health and Safety. At this point, we have successfully implemented the first part of these efforts, and we provide the details below. To begin, “The Science of Nuclear Materials” (referred to as SNM hereafter) needed to adjust its scope to respond to the culture and scheduling requirements of ESIA. Specifically, working professionals are accustomed to meeting only once per week in the evening. The thinking in this community is that classroom time actually constitutes a less significant portion of a student’s commitment to the course than perhaps those of us in the sciences generally expect. Instead, more substantial evaluative products such as term papers are the norm. As a consequence, we had to redesign our syllabus to conform to a single two-hour meeting per week over the 14week period of the semester. The first hour was devoted to lecture and the second hour consisted of a hands-on laboratory-based experimental portion designed to reinforce the content of the lectures. Specific topics for each week included radiation basics, the structure of the atom, half-lives, criticality and enrichment, fission reactions and yields. Six lectures on the nuclear fuel cycle in the latter half of the semester covered reactor types, operations, waste, reprocessing and accidents. Laboratory experiments were aimed particularly at reinforcing the lecture content and promoting a basic literacy of how, for example, radiation is measured and radioactivity is detected. We emphasized the use of standard equipment such as Geiger counters and multichannel analyzers and used a number of “off the shelf” experiments supplied with the Intermediate and Advanced Nuclear Laboratory kits from PASCO. These kits included “canned” experiments which we modified somewhat to match the level of our students and the language and context of our lecture material. Experimental topics included half-life determination (long-lived and shortlived isotopes), identification of daughters in the uranium decay chain, and effects of distance and shielding in radiation detection. A few lab activities did not involve equipment use and instead were guided inquiry projects where relevant problems were solved as a group. The latter included analysis of heat evolution in Fukushima’s spent fuel pools after the 2011 accident. Special mention should be made of the semester’s first laboratory meeting at which the exercise was to determine dose rates from some common radioactive objects, including Fiestaware, lantern mantles, and samples of uranium ore. At first, the students were rather leery of handling such materials, and the initial meeting was thus designed to dispel some myths about radiation. In that regard, we designed the experiments so that the students would compare the dose rates from these objects (at a fixed distance) to that received during a transcontinen-
III.
TEXTS AND READINGS
Several texts were used for this course: 1. “Megawatts and Megatons” by Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-375-40394-9; 2. “The World University Primer: Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century,” 2nd Edition, by Ian Hore-Lacy, ISBN 0-955-07841-5; 3. “Bluebells and Nuclear Energy” by Albert B. Reynolds, Cogito Books, ISBN 0-944-83863-4; 4. “Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Charles D. Ferguson, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-75946-0. The first three texts were required, and readings were assigned to support the lecture content. These were further supplemented with references to Wikipedia pages and popular literature when appropriate. The fourth text was recommended and served as a good introduction to a number of weapons and fuel cycle issues that were later treated at a more advanced level. IV.
EVALUATIVE PRODUCTS
A range of evaluative products was required including weekly homework assignments (12.5%), lab reports (12.5%), two mid-term exams (37.5%) and a term paper (37.5%). The weekly homework assignments emphasized developing math skills by way of dimensional analysis, conversion between units of radiation, binding energy calculations, fission yields, criticality calculations, half-lives, fuel burn-up compositions and decay heat calculations relating to spent nuclear fuel pools. Students reported that they typically spent four hours per week on homework assignments. A final term paper was required at the end of the semester and served a number of purposes. The MA students in ESIA are typically accustomed to significant research and writing assignments and are generally rather adept in this area. As such, it was decided to give the students an opportunity to get back into their “comfort zones” and take on a major writing assignment that would allow them to incorporate some of the technical knowledge and skills that they had acquired throughout the semester - this was the rationale for the relatively heavy weighting of this assignment. Some term paper 164
The Science of Nuclear Materials . . .
NUCLEAR DATA SHEETS
the most profound comment came from a student that stated “As a policy person I’ve found that the engineers I work with already respect me more due to my increased technical literacy.” Beyond these impressions however, a course evaluation was conducted by ESIA staff (independent of our own inquiries) and followed a format standard for all of their classes. From this survey, 92% of the respondents claimed to have “learned a great deal,” 69% were “very challenged” when it came to the level of intellectual challenge in the course, 77% were “very engaged” in the subject matter, and 68% said “A great deal” when asked about increased conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Looking ahead, we intend to offer the “Science of Nuclear Materials” course again in the Fall 2013 semester. This will then be followed by the second part, the “Nuclear Forensics” course, to be prepared for delivery in Spring 2014. The latter will cover the remaining two modules proposed in our original NRC submission: Materials Control and Accounting and Environmental Health and Safety. Going forward, these two courses will constitute a one-year sequence, with the “Science of Nuclear Materials” serving as a pre-requisite for the “Nuclear Forensics” course. In a more general sense, we anticipate these efforts to be the precursors of many opportunities for the technical and non-technical communities to engage at GW and beyond.
topics were suggested, but most students chose issues relevant to their particular interests or areas of employment. The primary criterion for the assignment was that the paper was not to be an analysis of policy, but rather a technical or “science first” paper. Students were encouraged to highlight technical challenges that may form the foundation of policy issues or opportunities within the nuclear arena, but they were discouraged from performing a strict policy analysis. This was achieved rather satisfactorily (after some dialog with the instructors) and topics included alternative fuel cycles, reprocessing, breeder reactors, fusion energy, nuclear submarines, the Megatons to Megawatts program, proliferation issues related to nuclear submarines, nuclear forensics, laser enrichment techniques and small modular reactors. V.
DEMOGRAPHICS
A total of 21 students enrolled in the inaugural offering of SNM during the Fall 2012 semester, 15 of whom were MA candidates in ESIA. Of these, only two had taken a college-level science course. Most of the students were already employed in the nuclear arena or had aspirations to do so in the future. Employers included NNSA, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Partnership for Global Security, the U.S. Department of State and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Among the other six students, a few were alumni auditors and a few were Ph.D. students in Chemistry. VI.
C. L. Cahill et al.
Acknowledgements: Financial support for this project was provided by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Award # NRC-HQ-11-G-38-0081). The authors are grateful to the following GW faculty and staff for valuable contributions: 1) Prof. Douglas Shaw, Associate Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, for useful discussions and technical support; 2) Mr. Daniel Hibbing, Radiation Safety Officer, for technical assistance, and 3) Prof. Philippe Bardet, faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for assistance with curriculum content.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In general, we view this initial effort as a success. Students have commented that they were inspired by the material and were far less apprehensive than they originally assumed they would be with technical content. Perhaps
165