About this blog

A little about me - I am Steve Skutnik, and I'm an assistant professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee. I hold a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University, and a B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Nuclear Physics from Iowa State University. My areas of research expertise (and, incidentally, the areas I tend to blog about the most) are around nuclear waste management, nuclear security, and reactor physics. In other words, much of my research life centers around the inherent issues that come up in the back end of the fuel cycle - after nuclear fuel has been taken out of reactors.

I started this blog with my co-blogger Alan (and my colleague Cyrus) directly in the wake of the Fukushima disaster - our shared goal was to try and as much as possible stay on top of exactly what was going on at Fukushima and convey this in an accurate way understandable by the lay public - namely because the media was at the time doing such a remarkably poor job of it. (This, incidentally, started out simply as a facebook post which I shared around - but we quickly realized the situation was evolving much too fast to constantly keep updating a static facebook page. Thus, this blog was born.)

While the crisis at Fukushima has passed (although recovery will obviously take much longer), much of my goal with this blog stays the same: to inform, occasionally entertain, and most important provide an accessible forum to discuss all things pertaining to the fuel cycle in a way that the general public can understand.

Finally, a goal of this blog is to always convey the most accurate technical information possible, whether good or bad for the nuclear industry. I will freely admit to having my own preferences (otherwise, I wouldn't have changed fields to pursue nuclear engineering, after all), but above all else I believe as an academic and a blogger my first priority is always to the truth - which is why I'm willing to put my real name behind this blog.

Thanks for reading!