NPRE Undergraduate Seminar Series - Spring 2025
Dr. Ha Bui
Research Scientist, NPRE, UIUC
Dr. Jianqi Xi
Assistant Professor, NPRE, UIUC
Tuesday, March 4 | 12:00 - 12:50 pm
4039 Campus Instructional Facility (CIF)
Enhancing Economic Viability while Maintaining Safety of Nuclear Power Plants
Abstract: As global energy markets evolve and competition intensifies, ensuring the economic viability of nuclear power plants while upholding rigorous safety standards has become increasingly crucial. Through risk-informed solutions, the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory contributes to modernizing the current operating reactor fleet and accelerating the deployment of next-generation nuclear reactors, enhancing plant efficiency, profitability, and safety. This talk will provide an overview of SoTeRiA’s ongoing research projects, risk analysis courses at NPRE, and research opportunities for undergraduate students. The talk will also delve into one of the lab’s initiatives, the Integrated Enterprise Risk Management (I-ERM) methodology, which offers a comprehensive evaluation of both safety risk and generation risk for operating plants. I-ERM models the interconnected effects of physics-of-failure and maintenance work processes on equipment reliability and availability, integrating them into Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Generation Risk Assessment (GRA), and financial analysis to create a unified computational platform. This approach enables plant decision-makers to quantify the relationship between safety and profitability based on the underlying phenomenological models of equipment degradation and human performance. SoTeRiA’s ongoing research is advancing I-ERM for advanced reactors, addressing challenges such as limited experiential data, and promoting the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based digital technologies in the next-generation reactors.
Dr. Ha Bui, Research Scientist, SoTeRiA
Bio: Dr. Ha Bui is a Research Scientist in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Associate Director of Research and Outreach at the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory. Dr. Bui’s research advances Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) for existing light water reactors and advanced nuclear reactors, integrating advanced modeling and simulation solutions to enhance plant safety and decision-making under uncertainty. At the SoTeRiA Research Laboratory, he co-leads multiple DOE-sponsored projects on automation trustworthiness and transparency, fire risk analysis, common-cause failure analysis, and risk-informed decision-making to support the safe and cost-effective deployment of new technologies for nuclear power plants. Beyond academia, Dr. Bui spent over a decade at Power Engineering Consulting Company No. 2 (PECC2), a key consulting firm for the Electricity of Vietnam, where he contributed to the planning, design, and construction of power plants, gaining experience in engineering consulting, digital capability deployment, and energy infrastructure development.
Computational Approaches toward the Understanding of Materials Degradation in Nuclear Reactor Environments
Abstract: The growing global energy demand and concerns over energy security have underscored the need to enhance nuclear energy efficiency. Achieving this requires nuclear materials capable of withstanding increasingly extreme environments. For example, the advances in nuclear reactors create exceptionally harsh working conditions for materials operating at higher temperatures, and more intensive radiation doses, while maintaining integrity in the presence of chemically aggressive environments. In some cases, the effects of these environments can even couple with each other. Those extreme environments can degrade material’s performance, thus requiring fundamental improvement in materials. However, the improvement of materials for nuclear applications is a daunting challenge, especially in the absence of a comprehensive understanding of the behavior of materials in complex and highly coupled extreme environments. Using examples from our group’s research, we present strategies to overcome these challenges. Specifically, we employed computational techniques to understand the relationship between microstructure/microchemistry, corrosion, and radiation responses in nuclear materials. These techniques help us to understand the degradation phenomena from a top-down perspective and provide insights in design of nuclear materials with enhanced properties. Altogether, these examples highlight the great potential of modeling into understanding and improvement of materials behavior in nuclear applications.
Dr. Jianqi Xi
Bio: Dr. Jianqi Xi is an assistant professor in NPRE and the director of the MNM group at UIUC. Before moving to UIUC, Dr. Xi was a scientist of Digital FIB group in Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. Dr. Xi earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2017, advised by Prof. William J. Weber on the modification of functionality in nuclear materials. Then, he moved to Izabela Szlufarska’s group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as staff scientist to study the coupling effects of radiation and corrosion on the stability of nuclear materials. Dr. Xi is especially interested in applying multiscale models and machine learning techniques to the study of radiation & corrosion degradation of nuclear materials, as well as in employing digital twin approaches to predict surface topography under ion beam irradiation.
Upcoming Seminar - Mar 11 - Dr. Alan Durif, CEA
NPRE 199 Undergraduate Seminar is a series of lectures and discussions on current research and developments in the NPRE discipline areas. Presentations are led by visiting scientists and engineers from industry and research facilities as well as faculty and advanced students. Seminars are open to the Illinois community, space allowing. Undergraduate students wishing course credit for attending should register in NPRE 199.