Maximilian Kraus, in his second year of a PhD in Engineering, recently attended the prestigious Modelling, Experimentation and Validation (MeV) Summer School at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois, USA.
This summer school comprised 52 lectures on various aspects of nuclear engineering, presented by international experts in the field. In addition to these presentations, participants worked on group projects and visited the La Salle nuclear power plant as well as different labs, such as a molten salt experimentation facility and the Advanced Photon Source particle accelerator.
Maximilian also had the opportunity to visit the AURORA supercomputer, which is the second-fastest computer in the world, and the Nuclear Energy Exhibition Hall at ANL, which displays many historical artefacts from the early days of nuclear energy research. These include graphite blocks from Chicago Pile-1, the first human-built nuclear reactor with a self-sustaining fission chain reaction, and personal notes by Enrico Fermi.