MIT Lincoln Laboratory Auditorium

Refreshments: 3:30 PM, Talk 4 - 5 PM

Joint Meeting with the IEEE Life Members

Prof. Ian H. Hutchinson, Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT.

As energy sustainability and environmental impact becomes of increasing concern, nuclear power appears more and more attractive. This talk will explain for the non-expert where nuclear energy use currently stands in the US and the world, what is being done to enable new capacity to be built, the limitations and challenges of fission energy, and some of the current research topics of the profession.

Ian H. Hutchinson is Professor and Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. His primary research interest is the magnetic confinement of plasmas: seeking to enable fusion reactions, the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an experiment whose magnetically confined plasmas, with temperatures reaching beyond 50 million degrees Celsius, are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. He is the author of over 130 journal articles and of the key text on plasma measurements: "Principles of Plasma Diagnostics", now in its second edition. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, and Vice Chairman of the APS Division of Plasma Physics.