04/08/11 — When disaster strikes, all of us feel compelled to respond. Japan's devastating earthquake on March 11 called forth our faculty and students to help in ways only an engineer can.
03/19/11 Los Angeles Times — U.S. scientists and sensors are poised to detect radioactive fallout from Japan's nuclear accident, but aside from a 'minuscule' amount at a Sacramento station, they've found none. The nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley set up its own independent monitoring Wednesday on top of the campus' Etcheverry Hall. The system looks for gamma rays with energy "signatures" corresponding to radioactive isotopes, said Kai Vetter, a professor in the department. As of Friday morning, Vetter said, they hadn't seen any evidence of suspicious radiation.
03/18/11 Los Angeles Times — As a crack is discovered in a Fukushima spent fuel pool, officials confront two crucial tasks: preventing a runaway chain reaction into the nuclear fuel and maintaining a massive flow of seawater through the damaged pools and reactor vessels. Edward Morse and Per Peterson of UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering offer analysis.
03/18/11 San Jose Mercury News — While public health officials downplayed fears that a plume from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors was descending on California, scientists at UC Berkeley declared they were already detecting radioactive particles from 5,000 miles across the ocean. The differing accounts illustrated the confusion on the fallout from Japan's crisis, but scientists and public health experts agreed that whatever radiation may drift to California and the West Coast will be too minuscule to pose any health risks. "We see evidence of fission particles -- iodine, cesium, barium and krypton, a whole dog's breakfast of radiation," said Ed Morse, professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, whose students have set up a monitor on the rooftop of the campus's Etcheverry Building.
03/18/11 Bloomberg — U.S. nuclear power plants that store thousands of metric tons of spent atomic fuel pose risks of a crisis like the one unfolding in Japan, where crews are battling to prevent a meltdown of stored fuel, nuclear safety experts said. Nuclear plants weren't designed with the intention of storing their spent fuel permanently, said Bozidar Stojadinovic, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. "The plants have always been designed with the idea that the fuel will be taken care of," Stojadinovic said. "The government promised to do that."
03/15/11 KQED Forum — As Japan struggles to contain the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl, Michael Krasny talks with experts including Per Peterson, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department at UC Berkeley, about the potential fallout from the nuclear reactors in Fukushima.
03/15/11 Bloomberg — UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Don Olander said the damage to nuclear plants in Japan after an earthquake is different from the disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986. "This is a reactor which has two containments...If that is intact, if the melt has not gone through the bottom, then most of the fission products will stay inside. Chernobyl did not have that protection. Chernobyl was open and the entire core was destroyed."
03/14/11 San Francisco Chronicle — As Japanese nuclear engineers struggled to contain partial meltdowns of two major nuclear power reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami, experts in the United States said Sunday that a similar disaster would be highly unlikely here. Fifty-four power reactors regularly supply electricity throughout Japan, and the crisis represents "an incredibly rare worst-case disaster," said Jasmina Vujic, a professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley and a specialist in the design of reactor cores and radiation protection.
03/12/11 ABC News — States of emergency are in effect at five nuclear power plants in Japan. Evacuations are underway as the concern grows about the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. Berkeley nuclear engineers say the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which is now shut down, is about 40 years old. "This increase of radioactivity in the control room makes me very nervous," said UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Joonhong Ahn, who was born in Japan.
03/07/11 — A UC Berkeley-led consortium of seven universities has been awarded a multi-year grant ($25 million for a 5-year period) from the U.S. Department of Energy NNSA Office of Proliferation Detection. The consortium will largely focus on education and hands-on training of undergraduate and graduate students in the core set of experimental disciplines that support the nation's non-proliferation and nuclear security mission: nuclear physics, nuclear chemistry, nuclear instrumentation, and nuclear engineering.
04/07/10 — What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word nuclear? Mushroom clouds? Three Mile Island's reactor towers surrounded by swirling steam? Think again. Nuclear is back, big time. With climate change concerns escalating, fossil fuel supplies diminishing and electricity consumption expected to double in 10 years, nuclear has regained some of its lost luster. According to Brian Wirth, associate professor of nuclear engineering, “The 104 nuclear plants now in operation represent the largest source of carbon-free electricity in the country.”
04/07/10 — Clean and green technologies are on the rise in Silicon Valley. Electric car startups like Tesla Motors and solar cell and biofuel innovators are snapping up commercial space, while established companies like Applied Materials are growing their clean energy divisions. “Over the past six years, clean tech's portion of venture [capital] investments has grown from merely 3 percent to more than 25 percent,” reported the San Jose Mercury News in January. The newspaper went on to pronounce clean and green technologies the next great wave of innovation in Silicon Valley. It's no surprise to five Berkeley Engineering alumni who work in the up-and-coming sector.
03/04/10 The New York Times — Thomas H. Pigford, an independent-minded nuclear engineer who was recruited by the federal government for his advice on major nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, died Saturday at his home in Oakland. Dr. Pigford was the first chairman of the nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley. Before going to Berkeley, Dr. Pigford helped establish the nuclear engineering department at M.I.T. A chemical engineer, Dr. Pigford helped develop the process used by the government for years to harvest plutonium for bombs from irradiated reactor fuel. He was a co-author of "Nuclear Chemical Engineering," published in 1958 and considered the first text in the field.