Purdue Nuclear Engineering team named finalist in ANS Student Design Competition

The American Nuclear Society recently selected a team from Purdue Nuclear Engineering as one of four finalists in the 2026 ANS Student Design Competition, marking the second consecutive year that a Nuclear Engineering team has earned finalist recognition. The team will present its work, “Design of MaRCS Code: Modeling and Reduction of Californium Sources,” at the society’s November meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting’s theme is “Going Critical: Creating a Durable Nuclear Resurgence.”

All four team members were Purdue Nuclear Engineering seniors when they completed the project. Since then, Parker Smith and Veronica Miller have moved into industry positions. Tyrone Shields will enter the Navy’s Submarine Officer Basic Course this fall, while Peter Bradshaw has transitioned into the doctoral program in nuclear engineering.

Bradshaw explained that the MaRCS software is designed to take a planned reactor core layout and design parameters and determine the optimal placement of a reactor startup source. The source helps reactors reach criticality while remaining within the power levels detectable by radiation sensors.

Optimizing the source’s placement is key to minimizing the amount of Californium needed. Only a few hundred milligrams of Californium are produced each year, and advanced reactors could face challenges during startup if the U.S. supply becomes constrained.

“This project involved an investigation into the process of producing Californium in highly power-dense nuclear reactors such as the HFIR reactor at Oak Ridge National Labs, which partially led me to an interest in transmutation and nuclear waste,” Bradshaw said.

His research under Hitesh Bindra, associate professor and undergraduate program chair, focuses on linear proton accelerator stability, with the goal of using accelerators to reduce nuclear waste products or enable other isotope transmutation.

“Californium placement specifically is not an area of heavy research,” Bradshaw said. “This work is mostly done at reactor facilities during first-time startup, meaning that there hasn't been much focus on it since the 1970s and ’80s, when the U.S. was building more reactors.”


(From left to right) Parker Smith, Veronica Miller, Tyrone Shields and Peter Bradshaw are members of Purdue’s Nuclear Engineering team selected as one of four finalists in the 2026 ANS Student Design Competition. Photo provided.