Nurturing the Next Generation of Nuclear Innovators

The Manhattan Project solidified how the state of Washington became intertwined in the nation’s nuclear history. From those roots, it would be inevitable for a partnership between Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Washington State University (WSU) to form.

For PNNL’s Jonathan Evarts, Hope Lackey, and Erik Reinhart, this partnership opened doors and provided opportunities for their scientific careers to flourish.

Photographer and puzzle master

As an undergraduate at the College of Idaho in 2017, Lackey joined PNNL as a summer intern and knew she wanted to return. It was the second PNNL internship that piqued her interest in nuclear science, which led to her starting graduate school at WSU while working as a PhD intern at PNNL.

While many students learn of PNNL during their studies at WSU, Lackey is an example of the reverse.

“I transitioned to PNNL staff partway through my degree, and I completed my PhD degree in December,” said Lackey, an analytical chemist. “It would be more accurate to say that PNNL brought me to WSU.”

Lackey compares being a chemist to solving a big jigsaw puzzle, applying what you know to a specific situation, and piecing everything together until you see the picture, or solution.

She describes her day job as using spectroscopy cameras to take pictures of chemicals and molecules in nuclear waste, which is used to learn how to process it efficiently. A lot of her work is conducted at the historic Radiochemical Processing Laboratory.

“I’m not near reactive materials very often,” she said. “But what we’re doing is helping people who work at places like the Hanford Site. The analytical tools we’re developing contribute to the overall safety of the teams and their real-time monitoring processes.”

Astrophysicist to actinide analysis

In high school, the belief of a teacher steered Reinhart from being an astrophysicist to a chemist.

“As a junior, he gave me a senior chemistry test and just told me to take it because he knew that I could ace it,” said Reinhart, who was a postdoctoral research associate through the WSU-PNNL Nuclear Science and Technology Institute (NSTI) before joining PNNL as a staff scientist in 2023.

As an actinide scientist at PNNL, he focuses on the 15 metallic elements on the periodic table from actinium (atomic number 89) to lawrencium (atomic number 103). One of their distinctive characteristics is their radioactivity, which makes them crucial in nuclear reactions but adds significant challenges in handling and isolation.

“I was interested in utilizing and expanding my synthetic toolbox to the actinides toward the synthesis of low-valent uranium compounds during my time as a postdoc,” said Reinhart.

Working on various projects has allowed Reinhart to support the nuclear nonproliferation challenges with material recovery from irradiated nuclear fuel.

Nuclear waste buster

For Evarts, the path to PNNL wasn’t as clear. Growing up in Ohio, the budding engineer started fixing things for his parents at an early age. Then through school, he learned that his sweet spot was the combination of engineering, material science, and computational chemistry.

His deep dive into engineering and nuclear science started when he worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where he spent nearly a decade defueling the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

“We had a unique opportunity to pioneer the first defueling of a Los Angeles-class submarine,” said Evarts. “Overcoming the engineering challenges with a great group of people was one of my top professional highlights.”

In 2021, he started his PhD program at WSU, secured an internship at PNNL the following summer, and hasn’t left. Evarts, a material scientist at PNNL, joined the research staff in 2022, focusing on the full life cycle of nuclear energy, from the front-end production technologies to the backend nuclear waste disposal.

In his latest work on nuclear waste forms, he addresses nuclear fuel recycling technology waste streams. His paper, titled “Synergy in Materials: Leveraging Phosphosilicate Waste Forms for Electrochemical Salt Waste,” was published in February by ACS Sustainable Resource Management.

Nuclear nexus

This PNNL-WSU partnership provides a launch pad for students to deepen their firsthand experiences with leading experts at world-class facilities.

“Through NSTI, which is now a nuclear community focused on collaborative research opportunities, we provided a platform to elevate many students and staff in the areas of nuclear science, nuclear materials, and nuclear engineering,” said Neil Henson, senior scientist at PNNL and mentor of many WSU students. “In the past few years, we’ve seen at least 19 PhD students, 2 postdoctoral fellows, and 10 WSU-PNNL joint appointments in these key areas of nuclear security.”

This year, PNNL celebrates its 60^th year. For most of that time, WSU has been a key research collaborator.

“The success of our collaboration with WSU is evident when you look at our talented staff,” he continued. “We plan to continue the success of attracting top researchers to our organizations who will support our nation’s national security missions.”