Nuclear Data Validation Scientist Summer Placement 2025

UK Atomic Energy Authority • Placement • Culham, England, United Kingdom • £43k - £52.62k / year • 1m ago

Company Description

By 2050, the planet could be using twice as much electricity compared to today. Are you interested in contributing and helping to shape the future of the world’s energy? If so, read on.

Fusion, the process that powers the Sun and Stars, is one of the most promising options for generating the cleaner, carbon-free energy that our world badly needs.

UKAEA leads the way in realizing fusion energy, partnering with industry and research for groundbreaking advancements. Our goal is to bring fusion electricity to the grid, supported by tomorrow's power stations. In pursuit of our mission, UKAEA embraces core values: Innovative, Committed, Trusted, and Collaborative.

Job Description

The Role

Are you looking for an exciting opportunity to make a difference? Join our team and contribute to the future of fusion energy.

We offer excellent opportunities for motivated and enthusiastic undergraduate students studying at UK Universities to join our 8-12-week summer placement scheme. The scheme is designed for students entering their penultimate or final year of studies, with potential opportunities post-graduation.

Our scheme gives you a unique opportunity to contribute to the development of one of the most advanced sources of sustainable and clean energy. During your summer programme, you will experience a broad range of diverse tasks, work on real projects, and gain invaluable experience within the fusion energy sector. UKAEA offers a nurturing and supportive community for you to gain some valuable work experience in a fascinating and rapidly evolving industry.

Overview

Project Title: Building on fusion, fission events inventory and decay heat short term simulation protocols.

The use of different nuclear data libraries and protocols can have a profound effect on the simulation of decay heat for all nuclides, including the main constituents of LWR fuel and fusion components at short or long cooling times.

To better understand the root cause of these differences, FISPACT-II can be employed by swapping individual decay or reaction files and comparing heat and inventories at a selection of cooling times. By doing this, the effects of library differences can be easily discovered and nuclides which both contribute non-negligibly to decay heat and have discrepant yields or decays can be identified.

Project Motivation: Inventory and decay heat prediction for fission events can rely on high-quality decay heat experiments under different neutron spectra, targets and decades of validation efforts while fusion events inventory and decay heat calculation would benefit from the robust simulation protocols developed, but there are far less experiments across a wider target landscape."

Qualifications

Essential Requirements:

To be considered you will need to be working towards a relevant degree and will be required to have the right to work in the UK.

Additional Information

A full list of our benefits can be found here https://careers.ukaea.uk/life-at-ukaea/employee-benefits/

UKAEA's mission is clean energy for all, and we welcome talented people from all backgrounds who want to help us achieve our mission. We are under-represented from some groups and so want to encourage applications in particular from women in STEM, people from Black British Caribbean and African backgrounds and from Pakistani and Bangladeshi British backgrounds. Our Executive team, supported by our 'Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion' (EDI) and Wellbeing and our EDI Networks actively promote Inclusion and takes steps to increase diversity within our organization. We reinforce best practices in recruitment and selection and evaluate approaches to remove barriers to success.

UK Atomic Energy Authority is committed to being accessible. Please email talent@ukaea.uk if you have any questions or require help or adjustments to compete on a fair basis, for example, changes to the way we interview or share information.

Please note that vacancies are generally advertised for 4 weeks but may close earlier if we receive a large number of applications.