The Radiant Collection
Confine a star.
Walk in.
One uranium fuel pellet, the size of a fingertip, holds about as much energy as a ton of coal. A reactor core holds more than eighteen million of them.
Scroll, or press the button, to walk in ↓
The Reading Room
Every exhibit is a book.
Five shelves, one for each part of the story. Three of these you do not just read — you operate them: run a reactor, build a grid, fire a neutron. They are marked on the shelf.
The case for nuclear energy
Bringing data-driven clarity to a conversation governed by fear for half a century.
The lobby · choose a room
How fission works
All that heat comes from splitting atoms. Turn the page to watch a single split become a chain reaction, then fire your own neutrons and find the point where the reaction just barely sustains itself.
A free neutron
Turn the page to split the atom
- A free neutron. It starts with one loose neutron drifting through the fuel. Slow neutrons work best: a fast one tends to glance off, while a slow one lingers long enough to be caught.
- The nucleus absorbs it. A uranium-235 nucleus swallows the neutron and becomes uranium-236 for an instant. The extra energy makes it wobble and stretch like a droplet about to break.
- The split. It tears in two. A little of its mass converts straight into energy (E = mc²), which is why a fuel pellet the size of a fingertip holds roughly as much energy as a ton of coal.
- Two or three more neutrons. The split also flings out fresh neutrons. This is the part that matters: the reaction has just produced the very thing that started it.
- The chain reaction. Those neutrons find more nuclei and split them too. Each generation can double the last, which is what makes fission self-sustaining rather than a one-off event.
- The number that decides. Whether that chain grows or fades comes down to one number, k: how many neutrons from each split go on to cause another. Below one it dies out; above one it grows; at exactly one it sustains itself. Holding it at one is what a reactor does.
k is the multiplication factor: how many of each split's neutrons go on to cause another split.
The split
A slow neutron strikes the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom. The nucleus absorbs it, wobbles, and splits into two smaller atoms. A tiny bit of its mass turns directly into energy (E = mc²), which is why so little fuel gives off so much heat: one pellet the size of a fingertip holds about as much energy as a ton of coal.
The chain reaction
Each split also flings out two or three fresh neutrons. If those go on to split more nuclei, the reaction sustains itself. Left unchecked it doubles and doubles; the whole trick of a reactor is to hold it right at the edge, where each split triggers exactly one more.
Whether a chain reaction grows, holds, or fades is one number. k counts how many neutrons from each split go on to cause another. Below one, each generation is smaller than the last and the reaction dies out. Above one, it grows. At exactly one it sustains itself without growing, which is the condition every power reactor is built to hold. How it is held there is the next exhibit.
Why a reactor holds still
A chain reaction that doubles every millisecond would be uncontrollable. Reactors are not, and the reason is physics rather than engineering nerve. Pull the rods and watch what stops you.
A reactor you can actually drive
Two things make a reactor steerable. Under one percent of fission neutrons arrive late, seconds after the split, and that delay sets the pace of every change. And as the fuel heats, it absorbs more neutrons and pushes the reaction back down on its own. Pull the rods too far and the fuel stops you before an operator could.
Pull past 650 pcm — that is β, where the chain stops needing its late neutrons. Then watch the fuel-temperature line take it back off you.
Model: one-group point kinetics with a Doppler fuel-temperature feedback, integrated in the quasi-static (prompt-jump) approximation below prompt critical and stepped directly above it. Constants: delayed neutron fraction β = 0.0065 for thermal fission of uranium-235; prompt neutron generation time Λ = 2×10−5 s for a light-water reactor; fuel temperature coefficient −3 pcm/K, inside the −5 to −2 pcm/K range quoted for pressurized-water reactors. How to read this: a teaching model, not a plant simulator. It does not model xenon, moderator feedback, burnup or thermal-hydraulics. The automated tests check it against results the code never evaluates: the integrated trajectory must track an independent Runge–Kutta reference through a prompt excursion, the Doppler feedback must settle at the temperature and power the constants predict (198.8% of rated power at 827 °C for an 800 pcm withdrawal), and after a scram the power must fall by the prompt drop β/(β − ρ) and then decay on the delayed-neutron tail rather than to zero. The period readout solves the one-group inhour relation for its dominant root, so it stays finite and continuous through prompt critical. NRC: Doppler coefficient.
Withdraw the rods a little and power climbs, but it climbs on a leash: the period never drops below a few seconds, because the reaction is waiting on neutrons that arrive seconds late. That is the whole reason a human, or a control system, can steer one at all.
Push past 650 pcm and the leash comes off. The reaction no longer needs the late neutrons, and the period collapses from seconds to milliseconds. Watch what stops it. Nobody moves a rod that fast. The fuel heats, and hot fuel captures more neutrons than cold fuel, so the reaction throttles itself in the time it takes the pellets to warm.
This is also the honest answer to a question people arrive with. A chain reaction can be arranged to give up its energy over years or in an instant, but those are different machines rather than one machine at two settings: at three to five percent enrichment a power reactor runs out of reactivity long before it could detonate, and the same temperature feedback that catches a rod withdrawal fights any excursion all the way up.
A real nuclear plant
Before the diagrams, the object itself: an aerial pass over the cooling towers of a working station. The next volume goes inside.
Those towers are the most recognizable part of a nuclear plant, and the most misunderstood. The white plume is water vapor condensed into droplets, not smoke and not radioactive. To see what happens underneath, take the tour →
Inside a nuclear power plant
No mystery and no green goo. Turn the page to follow the energy from a uranium atom to the power line, then click any part of the plant to explore it yourself.
The reactor core
Turn the page to follow the energy
- The reactor core. Uranium atoms split apart, releasing intense heat with no flame and no smoke. Control rods slide between the fuel rods to speed the reaction up or slow it down.
- The steam generator. That superheated water runs through thousands of thin tubes, boiling a completely separate loop into steam. The two loops never mix, so the water that boils never touches the reactor.
- The turbine hall. High-pressure steam blasts into the turbine and spins it thousands of times a minute. The shaft drives a generator exactly as it would in a coal or gas plant. Only the heat source is different.
- The condenser. Spent steam is cooled back into liquid water and pumped straight to the steam generator to boil again, around and around in a sealed loop.
- The switchyard. A transformer boosts the voltage on the way out. High voltage lets the power travel for miles down the transmission lines with very little lost along the way.
- The cooling tower. Leftover heat leaves through a third water loop as water vapor, which condenses into the visible white plume. That plume is not smoke and it is not radioactive; it is the same cloud that rises off a boiling kettle.
Read the whole process, start to finish
- The reactor core. Uranium atoms split apart (nuclear fission), releasing intense heat with no flame and no smoke. Control rods slide between the fuel rods to speed the reaction up or slow it down. A pressurizer keeps this water liquid under about 150 times normal air pressure, even though it is hotter than 300°C.
- The steam generator. The superheated, high-pressure water from the core flows through thousands of thin metal tubes, boiling a completely separate loop of water into steam. The two loops never mix, so the water that turns to steam never touches the reactor.
- The turbine hall. The high-pressure steam blasts into the turbine and spins its blades thousands of times a minute, turning heat into motion. The spinning shaft drives a generator, which makes electricity by the same principle as coal, gas, and hydro plants. Only the heat source is different.
- The condenser. After the steam has pushed the turbine, it is cooled back into liquid water here and pumped straight back to the steam generator to boil again, around and around in a sealed loop.
- The switchyard. The electricity leaves the generator and passes through a transformer that boosts its voltage. High voltage lets the power travel for miles down transmission lines with very little lost along the way.
- The cooling tower. The leftover heat is carried away by a third water loop and released from the giant towers as water vapor, which condenses into the visible white plume. That plume is not smoke and it is not radioactive; it is the same cloud that rises off a boiling kettle.
How one gets built
A plant is a decade-long civil engineering project before it is ever a power station. Turn the page to watch one go up, from bedrock to first power.
Clearing the site
Turn the page to build it
- Clearing the site. Years before any concrete, the ground is surveyed and cleared. The location has to satisfy seismology, hydrology, and a grid connection all at once, which is why siting alone can take a decade.
- Excavation. Crews dig out to solid bedrock, often twenty meters down. The rock has to be sound enough to carry the whole plant and hold it steady through an earthquake.
- The base mat. A single raft of reinforced concrete is poured across the pit in one continuous operation, sometimes running for days without stopping. Every building above is anchored to this one slab.
- Containment rises. Metre-thick reinforced concrete walls climb around a sealed steel liner. This is the shell built to hold everything in, whatever happens inside it.
- The dome goes on. The dome is assembled on the ground and lifted into place in one piece by one of the largest cranes on earth. It is the moment the building becomes recognizable.
- The reactor arrives. The pressure vessel is lowered in and the internals follow: steam generators, pumps, and thousands of kilometers of cable. Most of the remaining work is now inside.
- The turbine hall. The conventional half goes up alongside: turbine, generator, condenser. This part is much the same as any thermal power station; only the heat source differs.
- Cooling towers. The towers are slip-formed upward in a continuous pour, growing a few meters a day until they stand taller than almost anything else on site.
- Connected to the grid. The switchyard ties the plant into the transmission network. After years of commissioning and regulator sign-off, it synchronizes to the grid and starts delivering power.
The numbers the headlines leave out
The most powerful argument for nuclear energy is also the most counterintuitive: it is among the safest ways to generate electricity ever devised.
Death rates, per terawatt-hour
The most counterintuitive number in energy. The figures include accidents and air pollution, and the nuclear bar even carries modeled long-term Chernobyl deaths, not only the direct ones. It is still the lowest on the wall.
Source: Our World in Data (2020), based on Markandya & Wilkinson (2007, The Lancet) and Sovacool et al. (2016). How to read this: figures include accidents plus air pollution; nuclear includes modeled long-term Chernobyl estimates, not just direct deaths. Per-TWh values depend on modeling assumptions. Accessed Jul 14, 2026.
Read that chart again. Coal is roughly 820 times deadlier than nuclear per unit of energy, yet it is nuclear that carries the public fear. The deaths caused by coal are invisible because they are diffuse: studies attribute somewhere between hundreds of thousands and over a million premature deaths to coal air pollution every year, spread across whole populations as respiratory and cardiovascular disease and never attributed to a single dramatic event. Nuclear's rare accidents are visible, named, and televised.
Our perception of risk tracks visibility, not body count, and that single cognitive bias has shaped a generation of energy policy.
Coal air-pollution mortality: GBD MAPS (McDuffie et al., 2021, Nature Communications); Lelieveld et al. (2023, BMJ). Ranges differ because studies model exposure and baseline health differently.
Facts vs. perception
Even the disasters tell a more measured story than memory suggests. Select an incident to compare what people feared with what the evidence found.
Three accidents, and what they actually did
Choose a case. Each pairs what was feared at the time with what the evidence found afterwards. Nothing here is dismissed. The exhibit is about the size of the gap between the two.
The pattern across all three is the same. The measured radiation death tolls are far smaller than public memory of them, and they are also not the whole cost: evacuation, displacement and decades of cleanup are real harms, they are expensive, and at Fukushima they did more damage than the radiation did. Judging a severe accident honestly means carrying both of those facts at once, and being clear about which figures were counted and which were modeled.
How these numbers are counted: "confirmed" means direct radiation deaths documented in UNSCEAR and WHO assessments. Modeled long-term projections, evacuation-related deaths, displacement, and cleanup costs are listed separately because institutions count these categories differently, and an accident's full impact is much more than its death toll. Sources: UNSCEAR 2008 and 2013 reports; WHO; U.S. NRC.
Radiation, in everyday context
You are exposed to radiation every day, from rocks, the sky, and your own food. The question is never "is there radiation?" but "how much?"
What is a millisievert?
A millisievert (mSv) measures radiation dose. The average person receives about 3 mSv per year from natural background radiation: cosmic rays, radon, and radioactive elements in soil and rock.
The key insight
The NRC estimates that living near a U.S. nuclear plant adds about 0.001 mSv a year, a few thousandths of natural background. One cross-country round-trip flight gives you roughly 40 times more.
Everyday radiation doses, compared
Everything on this wall gives you a dose: the granite under your feet, the food in your kitchen, the sky on a flight. The bar for living beside a nuclear plant is the one you have to look for.
Source: U.S. NRC, "Doses in Our Daily Lives"; EPA. How to read this: effective-dose estimates; simple comparisons do not capture every contextual difference between dose types. Linear scale; the plant's near-invisible bar is the point. Accessed Jul 14, 2026.
How often does each source actually produce power?
Capacity factor is the share of the year a plant spends generating at full power. U.S. nuclear plants ran at 90.8% in 2024, around the clock, in every season. In recent U.S. data, that is the highest average of any major source.
Average capacity factor by energy source
Capacity factor is a measure of availability, not of cost. It answers one question: of all the hours in a year, how many did this actually spend generating? Nuclear ran at 90.8% of them, in every season and in every kind of weather.
Source: U.S. EIA, Electric Power Monthly, Tables 6.07.A and 6.07.B. Annual 2024 values, U.S. utility-scale generators. Capacity factor compares actual generation with the maximum possible. Accessed Jul 14, 2026.
Firm sources
Nuclear, geothermal, coal, gas, reservoir hydro. Available on demand, day or night, whatever the weather. Nuclear, geothermal and coal run steadily around the clock; gas and reservoir hydro ramp up and down to follow demand.
Variable sources
Solar, wind, run-of-river hydro. Output follows the weather, so they need firm capacity, storage, or transmission to fill the gaps.
Wind and solar are essential and growing, but they are variable. A grid built heavily on weather-dependent sources needs something to fill the gaps when the weather doesn't cooperate. That "firm" clean power is what nuclear provides. In many power systems today, natural gas supplies much of that firm capacity, though hydropower, storage, transmission, geothermal, and demand response also contribute.
Capacity factor measures availability, not cost. A plant that runs 90% of the year can still be the expensive option if it cost too much to build, which is a real problem for nuclear and one taken up in what nuclear still has to solve.
What existing plants cost to run
Running costs and building costs are different questions. Existing nuclear plants are inexpensive to operate; new construction is where nuclear struggles, which the next wing takes up in full.
Operating expenses of existing plants
Running a reactor that already exists is cheap. Building a new one is not, and this chart says nothing about that: it counts fuel, operation and maintenance, and nothing else. The expensive part of nuclear happens before the plant ever produces a watt.
Source: U.S. EIA, Electric Power Annual, Table 8.4. 2024 operating expenses for major investor-owned utilities. How to read this: running costs only. Excludes capital, financing, transmission, and decommissioning; wind and solar are not in this table. New-build economics differ greatly. Accessed Jul 14, 2026.
Two caveats keep this honest. First, these are operating expenses only. Counting more cost categories, the industry's own analysis (NEI, Nuclear Costs in Context, 2024 data) puts average total generating costs at $31.88 per MWh for multi-unit plants and $41.88 for single-unit plants. Second, none of this describes new construction, where high capital costs and financing risk are nuclear's real economic challenge.
Nuclear's high capacity factor still works in its favor: because a plant actually generates about 91% of the hours in a year, its costs are spread across far more delivered electricity.
Build your own grid
Power a city that needs 1,000 MW around the clock. Choose the mix, and the model computes the carbon, the hardware, and the reliability picture from the same cited data used across this site.
A city that needs 1,000 MW, around the clock
Choose the mix and the model does the rest: the carbon, the hardware you would have to build, and how much of the supply holds when the weather turns.
Natural gas fills whatever share is left: 30%. Slide a source up and gas gives way.
Assumptions and equations
- Demand is a constant 1,000 MW (8,760 GWh per year). Real demand varies by hour and season; ignoring timing flatters variable sources, because storage and curtailment are not modeled.
- Capacity factors are U.S. 2024 annual averages from EIA (reference 6): nuclear 90.8%, gas combined cycle 60.5%, hydro 34.6%, wind 34.0%, solar 23.2%.
- Lifecycle emissions are IPCC AR5 medians (reference 4): nuclear 12, wind 11, hydro 24, solar 48, gas 490 gCO₂eq/kWh.
- Capacity per source:
MW = share × 1,000 ÷ capacity factor. Carbon intensity:g/kWh = Σ share × emission factor. Firm share:nuclear + hydro + gas. - Hydropower is counted as firm because reservoir hydro is dispatchable, though droughts and seasonal water levels constrain it in practice.
- Gas capacity is sized at its average utilization (60.5%). A real grid overbuilds dispatchable backup well beyond this to cover peaks and calm, dark weeks, so a variable-heavy mix needs even more hardware than shown.
- Grid references (U.S. about 370, France about 56 gCO₂/kWh in 2023) are from Ember via Our World in Data (reference 16).
- This is an educational model, not a grid-planning tool. Real planning models hourly weather, transmission, reserve margins, storage, and cost.
Try it: slide solar toward 80% and watch the buildout number climb while the firm share collapses. Then slide nuclear up and watch carbon intensity fall toward France's levels with a fraction of the hardware. That trade-off, in one toy model, is the argument of this site.
What the record says
You have now seen the death rates, the three accidents, the doses, the uptime, the running costs, and a grid you balanced yourself. Laid beside each other, they point the same way, and this is the shortest honest summary of them.
As safe as wind and solar, and hundreds of times safer than the fossil fuels we burn without a second thought. Nuclear sits beside wind (0.04) and solar (0.02), roughly 820 times below coal.
Source: Our World in Data ↗About two-thirds of French electricity, the highest share of any country. IAEA PRIS ↗
IPCC median over a plant's lifetime, on par with wind; UNECE finds 5 to 6 g. IPCC AR5 ↗
Clean and firm. As clean as wind over its lifetime, and uniquely able to deliver that power reliably, around the clock.
Waste is small and controlled. A managed problem, not a mythical one, and it never leaves human control.
Next-gen fails safe by design, and its energy density means clean power from a remarkably small footprint of land.
Judged on the same evidence as everything else on the grid, nuclear comes out among the safest, the steadiest and the cleanest sources available. What it has not solved is the next wing.
What nuclear still has to solve
"Honesty over hype" means naming the problems, not just the strengths. Some of these are financial, some are physical, and some are political. All of them are real, and any serious case for nuclear has to carry them.
Construction cost and time
Recent Western builds have run far over budget and years behind schedule. Georgia's Vogtle units 3 and 4, the only new reactors completed in the United States in decades, finished years late and far above their original budget. Korea, China, and the UAE have built much faster, so the problem is not physics, but it is real.Financing risk
Billions must be committed a decade before the first kilowatt-hour is sold. That uncertainty raises the cost of every borrowed dollar and scares off investors.Waste disposal politics
Interim storage works today, but no country yet has a permanent geological repository in operation, and the U.S. still has none after decades of trying. Finland's Onkalo project is the closest any country has come.Rare but severe accidents
Accidents are extremely infrequent, but when they happen the displacement, cleanup costs, land restrictions, and fear last for decades, well beyond the direct casualties.Mining, water, and heat
Uranium mining disturbs land and has a poor historical record near some communities. Plants also need large volumes of cooling water and discharge waste heat.Proliferation and security
Enrichment and reprocessing technology overlaps with weapons capability. That is why international safeguards and inspections exist, and they must stay strong.Workforce and supply chain
Decades with few new builds thinned out the specialized workforce and supplier base. Rebuilding that capacity takes years, not months.SMR uncertainty
Small modular reactors are promising but mostly unbuilt. Their cost and timeline figures are projections, not track records, and first-of-a-kind projects have already seen cancellations.Why make the case anyway? Keeping an existing plant running and building a new one are very different economic decisions, and the evidence for the first is much stronger than the fear suggests, while the second is hard but improving. Nothing above is a rounding error: several of these problems are unusually difficult, and some of them are physical rather than political. But no source of energy comes without a column like this one. The honest test is not whether nuclear has one, it is how this column compares with the columns of everything the grid would otherwise burn or build instead.
The field is moving
Most of what changes in nuclear energy falls into a handful of long-running questions. These are the ones worth watching, and the headlines below are where they currently stand.
Keeping the existing fleet
The cheapest low-carbon electricity available is a paid-off reactor that keeps running. Licence renewals, uprates, and the restart of recently closed plants decide how much of the current fleet survives the next twenty years.Building large reactors on schedule
The open question is not whether large plants work, but whether the West can build them repeatably at a predictable cost. Watch whether later units in a series come in faster and cheaper than the first, which is where the record has been worst.Whether SMRs arrive
Small modular reactors trade unit size for the chance to build in a factory. Their projections are not yet track records, so the meaningful news is orders placed, concrete poured, and units finished, rather than designs announced.Fuel and the back end
Accident-tolerant fuels, higher enrichment, and where used fuel finally goes. A working geological repository would remove the most durable political objection to the whole technology.Who supplies it
Enrichment, components, and the specialized workforce are concentrated in a few countries. Where that capacity is rebuilt shapes both cost and the safeguards question.Headlines refresh automatically several times a day.
Myths vs. facts
A reference shelf rather than another argument. These are the objections people actually arrive with, answered in one place and in short form; the galleries behind you make most of these cases at greater length. Tap a myth to see what the data says.
FactSince the 1950s, U.S. commercial reactors have produced roughly 90,000 metric tons of used fuel, growing by about 2,000 tons a year. It is solid and tracked: stored first in water-filled pools at reactor sites, then moved into sealed dry casks after it cools. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, if all of it were stacked it would cover a single football field to a depth of less than 10 yards. That counts the fuel assemblies themselves, not packaging or spacing, and used fuel is distinct from lower-level wastes, which are handled separately. The unsolved part is political, not technical: the U.S. still has no permanent geological repository, while Finland is completing the world's first.
FactOne cross-country round trip by air (about 0.04 mSv) exposes you to roughly 40 times more radiation than the NRC estimates for living near a nuclear plant for an entire year (about 0.001 mSv). Both are tiny next to the roughly 3 mSv everyone receives annually from natural background radiation.
FactA reactor physically cannot detonate like a nuclear weapon. The fuel is nowhere near enriched enough, and the physics are fundamentally different. Weapons require precise configurations that a power reactor cannot produce by accident.
FactA new generation of designs, including small modular reactors and molten-salt concepts, is built around passive safety: mechanisms that rely on physical properties such as natural circulation, gravity, and negative temperature feedback rather than powered equipment and operator action. The U.S. NRC certified its first small modular design in 2023. These designs are engineered to fail safe instead of failing loud, though most remain to be proven in commercial operation.
FactKnown uranium resources cover many decades at current consumption, and advanced reactors could stretch that much further by reusing spent fuel. Thorium is relatively abundant too, though commercially viable thorium fuel cycles still face technical, regulatory, and economic hurdles. The fuel-supply question is real but long-horizon, not imminent.
Why do these myths persist? Decades of Cold War association, high-profile accidents taken out of context, and a public understanding of radiation shaped more by movies than by measurement. The data tells a different story.
Working in nuclear
Nuclear runs on more than reactor physicists. It takes operators and electricians, regulators and inspectors, health physicists, welders and steamfitters, fuel-cycle chemists, construction managers, and researchers. Tap a role to see what it actually involves.
U.S. median annual wage, May 2024. Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook
For nuclear engineers through 2034, mostly replacing retirements. Source: BLS
Salary ranges in the role cards are indicative; see the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook for current medians by occupation.
Your pathway into nuclear energy
From a high-school classroom to a national laboratory, the route is well marked and much of it is funded. Every program named on this page is linked to the organization that runs it.
High school
- Take physics and calculus as far as your school offers them; both are assumed on day one of an engineering degree
- Build a shortlist from the programs below rather than by school name alone
- Read the ANS student resources, which list programs, competitions and scholarships in one place
Undergraduate
- Major in nuclear engineering, physics, or a related STEM field
- Apply to DOE SULI: ten weeks, paid, at a national laboratory
- Join your campus ANS chapter and apply for ANS scholarships
Graduate school (optional)
- MS or PhD for research and specialized roles
- NRC Graduate Fellowship or NEUP funding
- Thesis research at national laboratories
Early career
- Join NAYGN for professional development
- Pursue certifications (PE, CHP)
- Consider NRC licensing for reactor operations
Where to study
MIT ↗
Nuclear Science & EngineeringCambridge, MAUniversity of Michigan ↗
Nuclear Engineering & Radiological SciencesAnn Arbor, MIUC Berkeley ↗
Nuclear EngineeringBerkeley, CATexas A&M University ↗
Nuclear EngineeringCollege Station, TXPenn State ↗
Nuclear EngineeringUniversity Park, PAGeorgia Tech ↗
Nuclear & Radiological EngineeringAtlanta, GAUniversity of Wisconsin ↗
Nuclear EngineeringMadison, WIUniversity of Tennessee ↗
Nuclear EngineeringKnoxville, TNNorth Carolina State ↗
Nuclear EngineeringRaleigh, NCPurdue University ↗
Nuclear EngineeringWest Lafayette, INOregon State ↗
Radiation Health PhysicsCorvallis, ORNational lab partnerships ↗
PhD programs partnered with Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Idaho National LaboratoriesA sampling of well-known programs; many more U.S. universities offer nuclear engineering and related degrees, most from bachelor's through PhD. The American Nuclear Society maintains student resources and program listings.
DOE SULI internships ↗
10-week paid internships at DOE national laboratories for STEM undergraduates.
NEUP research funding ↗
DOE-funded research and internship opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.
ANS scholarships ↗
Up to $5,000 for students pursuing nuclear-related degrees.
ANS student chapters ↗
Network with peers and professionals, attend conferences, enter design competitions.
NAYGN ↗
North American Young Generation in Nuclear, for students and early-career professionals.
Women in Nuclear ↗
Support network, scholarships, and professional development for women in nuclear fields.
Make the truth impossible to ignore
For too long, public fear has drowned out the evidence. The numbers belong back at the center of the conversation. Not to win a debate with louder claims, but to put the data front and center.
About & sources
Desmond Wong
Desmond Wong is a 12th-grade student and aspiring nuclear engineer from California, attending Diamond Bar High School (Class of 2027). After years of watching public fear override scientific evidence in energy debates, he created Radiant to put the data front and center.
The work on these walls is his own: the research and sourcing behind every figure, the three simulations you can operate, the technical illustrations, and the museum itself, hand-built with no frameworks and no build step behind it.
Contact: wongdesmond414@gmail.com