Meet two interns building the nation’s energy future at Idaho National Lab
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EDITOR’S NOTE: EastIdahoNews.com is working with Idaho National Laboratory to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Each month, we’ll highlight the history, achievements and trials of the U.S. Department of Energy’s desert site. We’ll explore the INL’s influence on eastern Idaho and its impact on local people.
IDAHO FALLS – Many of the innovators and leaders of tomorrow are known as Idaho National Laboratory interns today.
Although many people might associate summer internships with the typical image of an unpaid barista training program, that’s not the case for INL interns.
“We provide professional development for (the interns). We want them to leave here well-rounded,” said Jimi Burtenshaw, student programs administrator. “So for the coffee-getters, that’s not a thing here.”
Burtenshaw emphasized the opportunities for professional development and the fact that the laboratory’s interns are paid for the role they fulfill.
“When they come on, they come on to a certain project,” Burtenshaw said. “They are hired on for a specific job and it has merit and value and adds value to the INL mission.”
Many of these students gathered at the INL Meeting Center on Aug. 7 for the Intern Poster Session. For the interns participating in what the laboratory calls its Research Excellence Programs, this is the culmination of the research they conducted over the previous (two or three) summer months.
EastIdahoNews.com met two interns at the event and learned more about their work for INL.
Meet two of the interns
One of these interns was Mary Sevart, a 24-year-old from the Kansas City area who had just finished the first year of her Ph.D. in material science at the University of Florida. Previously, she completed her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Kansas.
The other was Andres Nicolas Fierro Lopez, a 23-year-old currently working on his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at the University of Texas, where he also got his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, Lopez moved to Texas when he was young.
Sevart was presenting her research on the microstructure of nuclear fuels.
“Essentially, what I do is called a cook-and-look, so you irradiate a nuclear fuel, and then you look at it afterward and see how it changed and what it looks like, to see how safe it is and how long we can keep it in a nuclear reactor,” Sevart said.
This practice, called “transmission electron therapy,” ensures that the fuel running through a reactor is safe to use.
“We want to make sure that the nuclear fuels we put in a reactor will behave how we expect,” Sevart said. “We don’t want anything unexpected to happen or any sort of breach of nuclear fuels to happen, and so we just want to make sure that our fuels are safe before we put them out commercially.”
Lopez presented his research on verifying the accuracy of software that predicts the behavior of a molten salt reactor (MSR).
Instead of running like a traditional reactor, which is cooled by water draining through it, an MSR is cooled by sodium beryllium fluoride, which Lopez said allows it to operate at a higher temperature. However, Lopez’s research isn’t about the reactor itself; rather, it’s about ensuring the accuracy of MOOSE, a software framework developed by INL.
“The traditional way to run a reactor is you have an operator, and you have instrumentation, and you kind of interpolate and try to understand what’s going on. But if you could have a simulation that runs faster than real-time… you can get a live prognostic,” Lopez explained.
Although an MSR hasn’t been built since the 1950s, Lopez expects people operating one to use his research when they use MOOSE to model the reactor’s behavior.
Types of internships
Although both Sevart and Lopez specialize in nuclear energy, that isn’t the only area of research provided by the Idaho National Laboratory. Many of the internship positions aren’t even science-based.
“It’s not just science. We have business to paleontology (majors),” Burtenshaw said.
According to Burtenshaw, half of the lab’s internship positions aren’t science-related. There are over 120 different majors represented among INL’s student interns, fulfilling a variety of roles for the laboratory, including positions related to ecology, archeology, cybersecurity and more.
These internship positions are competitive, with INL receiving 5,000 applications this year. In total, the laboratory had 621 interns participating in its program this year.
“To go from 5,000 to 621 internships … it speaks of the caliber of students we get, and also that people really want to work for (us),” Burtenshaw said.
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Benefits of INL internships
Burtenshaw said an internship at INL is not just a great resume builder. It also provides the students with a strong professional relationship with a mentor.
“I know there’s a lot of mentors that stay in touch with their interns as they go back,” Burtenshaw said.
When you ask Sevart and Lopez, they speak highly of the mentorship they’ve been offered through their internships.
Sevart called the experience a “learning curve,” but it’s also taught her a lot.
“I’ve had a really good experience here. It’s very cool to come to work and be surrounded by all the experts in your field. Every day, I feel like I’m doing something new and learning from the people who know most about my topic in the field,” Sevart said.
While seeing them as geniuses, Lopez also sees his mentors as humble.
Despite his current mentor having three doctorates, “he’s so willing to help. He’s always there for us and he goes the extra mile to make sure that we’re taken care of, and that’s something I’m extremely grateful for,” Lopez said.
Burtenshaw expects the interns who studied at INL to become the experts in their field and to help determine how the country produces its energy.
“It’s just really interesting and exciting to be a part of something that is going to shape the nation’s energy future,” Burtenshaw said. “These are the researchers of the future … and (they’re) in our backyard.”
Brought to you by Idaho National Laboratory. Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, celebrating 75 years of scientific innovations in 2024.