Question: Hi, what has been your most interesting project you’ve worked on either at Atkins, the Culham centre or even now?

Michael Jones answered on 11 Mar 2021:

When I was working at Culham my main project was doing some experiments on bent tubes. These tubes were going to be used for something called the neutral beam heating system for ITER, which is the massive fusion reactor that is being built in the south of France. These tubes were bent into a specific shape to achieve their design purpose, and because they were bent it meant that it was possible that when the material was heated up the bends might want to try and straighten themselves out a bit. So I had to heat up the tubes and measure if they permanently deformed.

When I was at Atkins I worked on a number of really interesting projects. One interesting one was to do with various safety features that were being considered for a newnuclear reactor design called the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor. These features were to do with moving spent nuclear fuel out of the reactor building. My tasks involved making CAD (computer aided design) models of the building and producing animations to show how the fuel would be moved. Another good one was to do with components in the winch for something called the fuelling machine at another nuclear power plant. These components needed to be analysed to make sure that they were safe. I was tasked with finding out how these components were inspected, which led to me being able to visit the plant, to talk with the engineers who were responsible for keeping the components in good repair and I also got to climb up the fuelling machine and walk on top of the reactor (protected by many metres of steel and concrete).