ANS Fellow Alan Levin is the coordinator of the ANS WISE program. He has mentored ANS interns for more than 20 years, offering assistance with their research and serving as the principal technical reviewer of their papers.
The interns will be guided by a faculty-member-in-residence, who this summer is ANS Fellow Gilbert Brown, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell.Brown hasbeen the WISE faculty--member--in--residence three times before, in 1988, 2000, and 2018, and he will work with all of the interns to provide them with a balanced view of the Washington science and technology policy scene.
Harsh Desai, a current member of the ANS Young Members Group and a senior manager at the Nuclear Energy Institute, has arranged office space at NEI for Novich and Renfrow to use during the summer.
Novich comes from a university that doesn’t have a nuclear engineering program. However, that hasn’t been an obstacle for her because of a unique relationship between Boise State’s Materials Science and Engineering Department, Idaho National Laboratory, and other universities within the Center for Advanced Energy Studies research consortium. Novich has spent the last two years working in the department’s Advanced Materials Laboratory. The majority of her time was spent helping a Ph.D. student with research on a process to incorporate boron carbide into aluminum cast alloys for dry fuel storage to alleviate the need for traditional pool storage of used nuclear fuel.
While participating in WISE, Novich said she will choose a research topic that is similar to the research she’s already been involved in, which includes alternatives to traditional pool storage and the use of in-pile instrumentation systems to better analyze reactor systems. “I am also interested in small modular reactor capabilities,” said Novich, who, starting this fall, plans to pursue a Ph.D. at Boise State in materials science and engineering with an emphasis in nuclear energy and policy management.
Novich said her main goal for this summer is to get hands-on experience seeing how public policy works. “I want to be able to take the experience I will receive from WISE and relate it back to Idaho’s legislature during graduate school,” she said. “As someone who was born and raised in Idaho, I am excited to come to Washington, D.C., this summer, and I am honored to be sponsored by ANS for the WISE program.”
Renfrow is the second Lipscomb student to participate in the WISE program in recent years. Jericho Locke, who is now a science policy fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Science and Technology Policy Institute, was a WISE intern in 2017 and played a role in Renfrow’s decision to pursue the opportunity. “I found out about the WISE program through one of my professors because he had remembered Jericho completing the program,” Renfrow said. “I was telling him about my interest in nuclear policy, and he gave me Jericho’s contact information, so I reached out to him.”
Renfrow said he gained an interest in nuclear technology, specifically developing technologies such as molten salt reactors, while completing a summer internship last year at an aerospace company. During that time he realized that policy plays a vital role in the implementation of new technologies, so the WISE program sounded like a perfect fit for his interests. Renfrow said his goals for the program include gaining knowledge about the policy process in the nuclear industry as well as interacting with knowledgeable nuclear professionals. But that’s not all. “I want to produce research that is truly helpful to the industry and make an impact in some form,” said Renfrow, whose main research topic will be developments of thorium-fueled nuclear reactors and how they could be implemented in the future.
