Profile

My work is funded by EDF energy. EDF are in charge of operating the Nuclear reactors in the UK. 20% of our electricity is generated by nuclear power, so it’s a very important energy resource. Several of the nucelar reactors rely on Graphite as both a structural and working component. The role of graphite, other than being a structural componentof the core, is to slow down fast neutrons emitted by fission reactions of the Uranium fuel. These fast neutrons slowly damage the graphite through collisions, and this has to be monitored and measured regularly. My job is to model graphite on a tiny atomic scale to help EDF understand what properties of the graphite are being changed by the damage and how this may effect it on a large scale. Our work can go towards making a safety case to keep a graphite moderated reactor running or not.

My day starts out by checking my emails and sitting down with our research group at coffee and discussing the latest news and research in our field. I will have a look online at our resources to see if anyone has published new and interesting data on carbon materials. Our group run calculations for many different structures, mainly carbon based, using some very specialist software. This software is installed on a big computer at Sussex University that enables us to start with a few hundred atoms in a particular arrangement of our choice and ask the software to re-arrange them to how they would most likely do so in reality (called a structural optimisation). These final structures and their associated energies can be really important, as they may discover new defects or reactions that we didn’t expect! I also write some computer code (in a computer language called Fortran) to create big structures and crystals that would otherwise take me years to do by hand as the equations required can be quite long. At the moment I’m writing up the research I’ve been doing over the last 3 years to create a thesis, so a lot of my day is spent reading and writing carbon science.