U.S. Department of Energy
NEUP
nuclear energy
university program
In the seven years since he earned his doctorate in nuclear
engineering at Purdue University, Caleb Brooks has immersed
himself in the challenges and uncertainties associated with
advancing nuclear reactor technology.
“I’m certainly interested in improving the computational tools
to better predict what’s happening in a reactor,” said Brooks,
a former Integrated University Program (IUP) Fellow, now an
associate professor in the Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological
Engineering Department (NPRE) at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
There are other things, however, of which he is strongly
certain. One is that it is a good time to be a nuclear engineer
—although there is not nearly enough time to push things
forward as fast as they need to be moving. Second, he believes
microreactors are going to revolutionize the industry, not just
in remote locations but on college campuses and, eventually, at
factories and data centers everywhere.
Certainties and Uncertainties: Former IUP Fellow Finds Himself
Immersed In Microreactor Work, Applications
by Paul Menser for DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Program
A participant in the IUP in 2010, Brooks came to UIUC in 2014
with a background in thermal hydraulics and reactor safety.
Today, he finds himself in the middle of a project to build a
gas-cooled Tri-structural ISOtropic particle fuel (TRISO-fuel)
modular microreactor and integrate it with the university’s
other energy systems.
UIUC received an $800,000 Research and Development grant
through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) in 2020
to improve the modeling of hybrid energy systems. The project
team, led by Brooks, has leveraged the well-characterized and
diverse energy portfolio of the UIUC campus to analyze the
market case for microreactors in existing, energy intensive
microgrids. This work aligns well with UIUC’s preparation to be
an early site for microreactor technology. Since 2018, Brooks
has led an effort at UIUC to deploy a microreactor as a next
generation research and test reactor. Teaming with Seattle’s
Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, they have developed a proposal
for a 15-megawatt reactor at the university that will serve as
Associate Professor Caleb Brooks of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign and his research group specialize in thermo-fluid dynamics of nuclear systems and reactor flows, as well as hybrid energy
approaches for existing and future power systems.
