MaThRad Conversations with Industry : The State of Nuclear Data
Nuclear Data Futures: Responsible Innovation, Skills, and Collaboration
Monday, 6 October 2025 11am - 1pm, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick
MaThRad Conversations with Industry
As part of MaThRad's mission of engaging scholarship and capacity building, we would like to invite Warwic's Nuclear Research community to a seminar with the Head of Programmes from the UK Atomic energy Authority (UKAEA).
Programme
11:00 – 12:00 | Provocation & Panel Discussion
Are We Building Nuclear Futures on Shaky Ground?
Opening keynote provocation: Dr. Mark Gilbert, Head of Programmes, UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Panel dialogue on the role of scrutiny, accountability, and equity in nuclear research. Reflections on the skills and capacity required to address these challenges.
12:00 – 13:00 | Networking Lunch
An opportunity to connect Warwick researchers, doctoral students, industry, and government stakeholders.
13:00 – 14:00 | Technical Session
Advancing Nuclear Data for Fusion Applications: Motivation and Current Initiatives
Dr. Mark Gilbert will present a technical talk and UKAEA’s latest research, including work with JEFF-4.0 and targeted improvements in isotopes and reaction channels.
Exploration of how reduced uncertainty in nuclear predictions supports reactor design, safe operation, and decommissioning.
Motivation for and activities towards improved nuclear data for fusion applications
Nuclear data, describing particle (including neutron) interactions, reaction probabilities (cross sections) and decay behaviour, and the inventory and transport codes that use them, are critical to the design and operation of fusion experiments and future fusion power plants. For materials, predictions of transmutation, including gas production, and neutron-induced displacement damage rates, are part of the integrated modelling needed to understand performance evolution, degradation and lifetimes.
Nuclear data and codes are most often used to predict radiation fields and materials activation because these are needed to plan the safe operation, maintenance and decommissioning of nuclear devices. For example, simulations with inventory codes such as FISPACT-II are routinely utilised to support the prediction of ex-vessel gamma doses and radioactive waste arising for designs of EU-DEMO, often driving changes in material selection, and shielding configurations. The same nuclear reaction data used in inventory and transport simulations can also be employed to probe structural damage evolution, including being used to predict gamma-induced damage evolution and provide the source terms – as energy distributions of primary knock-on atoms or PKAs – for modelling of irradiation cascades.
This importance of nuclear data for fusion has motivated new activities at UKAEA to target improved nuclear data. As well as supporting the development of the latest Joint Evaluated Fission and Fusion nuclear data library (version 4.0) via tests using our established fusion decay heat benchmark, we are also identifying the isotopes and reaction channels with deficiencies that must be resolved to reduce uncertainties in transmutation and transport predictions for fusion reactors. This has directed both theoretical and experimental work on nuclear data for several materials such as C, Cu, and the fundamental (to fusion) DT reaction itself.
