I have always been intrigued with the idea of atomic

Burchill says nuclear interest is expanding

By: Nathan Ball

Posted: 9/10/08

William Burchill, Texas A&M's nuclear engineering department head for five years, was elected president of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) in June.

He said his election to the head of the professional organization was a tremendous honor.

"The core purpose of ANS is to promote awareness and understanding of the application of nuclear science and technology," Burchill said. "ANS is the recognized credible advocate advancing and promoting nuclear science and technology."

ANS was chartered as a professional organization within the National Academy of Sciences in 1954. There are 11,000 engineers, scientists, administrators and educators and 1,600 corporations and government agencies in the field of nuclear science and engineering.

"I have always been intrigued with the idea of atomic physics and technology," Burchill said, "even when I was very young."

Burchill was born in a hospital on the south side of Chicago, six blocks from the University of Chicago's old Stagg Field, where Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists demonstrated the first successful nuclear fission experiment.

After graduating from high school in 1960, Burchill enrolled at the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, in Rolla, Mo., where he studied metallurgical engineering with a nuclear option. There were no undergraduate nuclear engineering programs at the time.

After finishing his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1970, he took a job with Combustion Engineering, one of four companies that built the nuclear reactors in the U.S. at the time, move to Conn.

Burchill said the Three Mile Island (TMI) reactor failure in 1979 was a shock to the technical community. Burchill and others were asking how could this have happened.

Burchill was assigned to a team to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent future accidents.

"The analysis I did found answers to those questions," Burchill said. "I wasn't the only person working on this, but I was one of the earliest, and one of the first to publish my conclusions. There were a string of equipment and instrument failures, but the operator misinterpreted the readings at the controls and starved the core of cooling water."

Burchill said in spite of the meltdown, the core was completely contained, and no radiation leaks were detected. In a Some in the technical community viewed it as a success, but TMI has had a negative impact on the way Americans viewed nuclear power in the following decades.

Burchill taught at A&M's nuclear engineering department from 1982 to 1983, but he returned in 2003 when he was appointed department head from 2003 to 2007.

"This was a very exciting time," Burchill said, "because President Gates got authorization and funding from the legislature for the faculty reinvestment program. We increased faculty university-wide by 25 percent. Seven new faculty were added to the nuclear department. It was very, very exciting for me to recruit, bring them in, and get their labs set up."

During that period the student population increased from 160 to 200 for undergraduates and from 70 to 100 for graduates.

Kolin Loveless, a senior mechanical engineering major, met Burchill at A&M's 2008 SCONA Conference, where Burchill volunteered as a discussion facilitator.

"He is one of the most well-informed individuals I have ever interacted with," Loveless said, "As a facilitator he was able to keep us on-task and focused. He stressed the importance of keeping stationary power generation and transportation fuels separate. There was a professional side to him, but also a warm and caring side. Burchill struck me as an ordinary, personable man who has done extraordinary things."

Mark Browning, a senior nuclear engineering major, said that when Burchill was at A&M, he hosted an annual party at his house for all of the nuclear engineering students. Browning said that part of Burchill's legacy is that the nuclear engineering department has continued to attract more students and faculty.

"I got into nuclear engineering because it is a growing field. In the past three years, my major has been fun, exciting, and difficult all at the same time. I will be back for grad school next year," Browning said.

Burchill said that at one point, combustion engineering had 19 orders for new reactors, but over time all but three of those were canceled.

Burchill said that there are a lot of mechanisms which ANS can utilize to get the word out about the benefits of nuclear power, which he said is the best way to generate electricity now and in the future.

"Worldwide, there are 35 different plants under construction," Burchill said. "The largest announced programs are in China where 200 new reactors have been filed for out of 400 reactors planned to build worldwide."

"Seventeen U.S. based utilities announced plans for 33 plants, half of those have been filed with the regulatory agencies and the permitting process is underway," Burchill said. "What is necessary is for the first several of these new plants to achieve their advertised financial goals, which all indicators show that this should be the case. The financial and political communities will be waiting to see if this can be done successfully."

The sticky issue of nuclear waste is something that has been known and addressed for decades, Burchill said.

"It decays and isn't there forever. The ultimate disposal which is agreed upon worldwide is geological repositories. The long-term disposal site for the U.S. is in Nevada," he said. "Curiously, there has been a lot of obstruction from politicians in Nevada led by Sen. [Harry] Reid.

What people fail to realize is that immediately next door in New Mexico, the military has been operating one for eight years successfully with no complaint."

As ANS President, Burchill said he appreciates the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of professionals in his field.

"I have had meetings with Congressional staff members and the state department," he said. "I have traveled internationally and had some interaction with the International Atomic Agency - it is exciting to exchange ideas with people at these levels."