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A note from our Chair
| A Field Promotion in Time of War. |
| TRTR Community, As you will have already noticed I am not Dr. Cameron Goodwin. Cameron has taken a career opportunity and asked for me to take over as TRTR Chair a little early to allow her to focus on her new role as head of R&D for Project Omega. Please join me in congratulating her on this new endeavor and thank her for her service as TRTR Chair during an exciting period of growth and transition in training, research, and test reactors. I can’t help but feel like this is a field promotion during a time of war. Startup companies and established corporations are stealing each other’s atom wranglers as they race to design, license, and deploy advanced nuclear technology. It’s a wild time to be in the field! I’ve been a part of this community for many years. For those I haven’t met yet, I’m the current Reactor Facility Director at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI), a 1 MW pulsing Mark F TRIGA, where I’ve worked for the last 4 years. Our mission is to defend the nation from nuclear and radiological threats through research, leadership, training, and education. We support the readiness of the warfighter to operate in a potential nuclear or radiological battlefield through radiobiology research into medical countermeasures for acute radiation syndrome, biodosimetry in support of medical triage, equipment reliability testing, and training. I previously spent 12 years at Idaho National Laboratory working with NRAD and TREAT, 5 years in the control room at the Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant, 4 years testing submarine reactors for KAPL, and 3 years as an SRO at the University of Wisconsin as a student operator. I’ve been around many different types of reactors, and I hope to see many more variants constructed soon! Cameron’s early departure highlights the importance of RTR’s work as training platforms for the talent pipeline that will drive the nuclear industry’s expansion phase. The educational missions of many of our facilities will be essential in ensuring that the next generation of nuclear professionals carries forward the hard-earned lessons from the past as reactor designs evolve from PowerPoint slides into steel-and-concrete reality. The hands-on operational knowledge we develop and the safety culture we instill at our facilities will give our teams a solid foundation on which the next generation may build. The importance of this mission has been recognized by public and private entities. Renewed interest is being shown in building new research reactors at college campuses such as the recently announced Texas A&M partnership with ZettaJoule, the University of Illinois with Nano Nuclear, and the work already underway at Abilene Christian University with Natura. Additionally, investment from the DOE in nuclear education shows in WSU’s Reactor Ready Initiative and NC State’s K-12 Outreach program. We have witnessed substantial changes this quarter. The NRC has undergone a reorganization and a top to bottom review of Title 10 regulations in response to the ADVANCE Act and Executive Order 14300. There are currently 66 active rulemakings in progress with likely more to come. Kudos to Frances Pimental (Frankie) from NEI and their team helping organize reviews of the proposed regulation changes that affect RTRs. If you haven’t been involved with NEI supporting these reviews, I encourage you to reach out and participate during the critical public comment periods. This may be one of the biggest opportunities in a generation to drive change in nuclear regulation. I look forward to meeting with as many of you as I can at the 2026 annual conference on September 21-25 in Austin, TX. This year’s meeting is being hosted by the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Laboratory (NETL) at UT-Austin. Registration is now open. See you there! |
Andrew Smolinski Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute
