President appoints Turinsky to national nuclear waste review board

Dr. Paul Turinsky, professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University, has been appointed by President Barack Obama to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB).

Established in 1987, the NWTRB is an independent agency of the US federal government, acting as a science-based advisor and overseer of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) program for managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel. The board’s 11 members are appointed from a list of candidates submitted by the National Academy of Sciences. Nominees are chosen based on distinguished professional service and eminence in a field of science or engineering.

Turinsky’s areas of expertise are computational reactor physics in support of mathematical optimization of fuel management and nuclear fuel-cycle multiobjective decisions; uncertainty quantification and data assimilation in support of optimum experimental design applied to nuclear power plant safety and fuel-cycle assessments; and adaptive model refinement applied to nuclear power plant transient simulation. He is chief scientist for the Department of Energy’s Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors; NC State plays a key leadership role in the effort.

His work includes contributions to three books and numerous peer-reviewed technical publications. He is the recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education Glenn Murphy Award, the Edison Electric Institute Power Engineering Educator Award, the US DOE E.O. Lawrence Award in Atomic Energy, and American Nuclear Society (ANS) Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physics Award and Arthur Holly Compton Award. At NC State, he is a past winner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Extension, among many other honors.

He is a Fellow of ANS and a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Turinsky received a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1966 and an MSE and a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan in 1967 and 1970, respectively. He also received an MBA in 1979 from the University of Pittsburgh.

He joined the College of Engineering faculty in 1980 and served as head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering from 1980 to 1988 and again from 1999 to 2006.