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Celebrating Professor Michael Driscoll: A Symposium Advancing Nuclear Energy
In a two-day symposium held on April 28 and 29, the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT and the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) gathered over 90 colleagues and students, past and present, to honour Professor Michael J. Driscoll on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
The symposium, filled with insightful presentations and heartfelt tributes, was marked by a call to action from Professor Driscoll himself. Addressing the audience during the banquet, he charged them to "Go forward and make it so!" as he presented his "wish list" of innovations to advance nuclear energy.
His vision for the future of nuclear energy includes the development of cheap grid-scale storage, the implementation of a carbon tax, the development of nuclear hybrid systems like the FHR, a cautious optimism about small modular reactors, and a rebuttal of the linear no-threshold theory of radiation health risk.
The symposium featured more than 20 papers presented in six sessions, with topics ranging from the deep borehole concept for nuclear waste disposal to the "Fuel Cycle Front and Back End" session, concluded by Patrick Brady of Sandia National Laboratory and Ethan Bates, a doctoral student of Driscoll's.
Mujid Kazimi, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor of Nuclear Engineering, started the presentations with reflections on how to match reactors to their missions. A presentation titled "Advanced Computational Reactor Physics Methods" by Kord Smith drew much laughter from the audience.
Several speakers were Driscoll's former students and shared "Driscoll stories" during their talks, reminiscing about handwritten notes, also known as "Driscollgrams," a common practice where Professor Driscoll provided extensive and thoughtful comments and questions to his students, often early in the morning after thesis drafts were submitted.
Neil Todreas and Marc Goldsmith, both current and former faculty members, reflected on the mentorship role Driscoll played in their lives. Todreas is a current faculty member at MIT, and Goldsmith is the outgoing president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.
The banquet also saw the announcement of a new fellowship, the Michael J. Driscoll Graduate Fellowship in Nuclear Science and Engineering, which will support a graduate student in NSE every year in perpetuity. The endowment for this fellowship remains undisclosed at this time.
US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, in a congratulatory letter, noted that the sustained research on deep boreholes by Driscoll and his students over two decades has led to renewed interest in this option for nuclear waste disposal today.
As the symposium came to a close, it was clear that Professor Driscoll's legacy in the field of nuclear energy will continue to inspire and drive innovation for years to come.
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