Engineering the Future of Nuclear

About the episode

The on-going debate on nuclear feels like a constant battle of weighing the benefits of low carbon electricity generation against the public perception of potential risks. As some countries power ahead to expand their nuclear reactors, others are closing theirs down. In Australia, the AUKUS agreement will force Australia to not only invest in a nuclear industry but might spark a new debate about its position on nuclear technologies.

Nuclear engineer and lead of UNSW’s Nuclear Engineering program, Dr Edward Obbard, and Lieutenant Colonel Jasmin Diab, join STEM journalist, Neil Martin, to discuss exciting developments in nuclear engineering and discuss what impacts we can expect on society as a whole over the next two decades.

Jasmin Diab

Jasmin is a mum, leader, nerd and diversity advocate. Jasmin joined the Australian Army in 2001 and after graduating from the Australian Defence Force Academy and Royal Military College Duntroon, was allocated to the Royal Australian Engineers as a Combat Engineer.

With a background in explosive ordnance disposal, Jasmin has spent the majority of her career providing operational and training support in countering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threats and has seen operational service both domestically and overseas. She has just completed her tenure as a Commanding Officer of an Engineer Regiment. 

Jasmin is a big advocate for thinking differently and is a co-founder of the Defence Entrepreneurs Forum Australia (DEF Aus) which encourages bottom-up conceptual innovation. She is also the President of Women in Nuclear Australia, the Oceania representative on the Women in Nuclear Global executive, a member of the ARPANSA Nuclear Safety Committee and a Fellow with Engineers Australia. 

 

Edward Obbard

Edward Obbard studied mechanical design and materials engineering at the University of Nottingham, UK, and later studied mandarin Chinese while working on his PhD research in biomedical alloys at the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Metal Research, in Shenyang, China.

His experience of life in Shenyang, a developing industrial city of 8m people, about the same population as New South Wales, only with dark, -20C winters and powered almost entirely by coal, caused him to rethink the need for nuclear energy as an essential ingredient for development, environmental conservation and energy security for the 21st century. Thus redirecting his knowledge of materials science to focus on nuclear applications, he worked 2010-2015 at ANSTO designing and building new nuclear infrastructure for irradiated materials research; he now leads the growing and diverse nuclear engineering program at UNSW Sydney, which delivers education programs and research training in this critical sector for Australia, and the wider world.