Principal Reactor Fuel Engineer

Oak Ridge, TN | $150K–$170K | Relocation Available

If your expertise sits at the intersection of statistics, uncertainty quantification, materials qualification, and safety-critical engineering, this role offers the opportunity to apply it to a next-generation nuclear fuel program.

NANO Nuclear Energy is seeking a Principal Reactor Fuel Engineer to establish the statistical and uncertainty-quantification framework supporting qualification of the ceramic matrix TRISO fuel architecture for the KRONOS High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR).

Reporting to the Reactor Fuel Design Manager, you’ll have broad technical ownership for ensuring that fuel qualification decisions—from sampling plans and defect fractions to manufacturing demonstrations and model validation—are supported by defensible statistical methods, confidence levels, and uncertainty treatment.

You’ll work across fuel design, manufacturing, characterization, irradiation, post-irradiation examination (PIE), safety analysis, fuel-performance modeling, Quality Assurance, and Regulatory & Licensing, providing independent statistical concurrence on qualification-critical decisions.

• Own the statistical strategy supporting qualification of an advanced TRISO fuel architecture.
• Influence decisions spanning fuel development, manufacturing, testing, modeling, safety, and licensing.
• Establish statistical approaches before data collection, rather than simply analyzing completed datasets.
• Apply advanced methods to challenging sparse, censored, zero-failure, and heterogeneous datasets.
• Provide independent technical concurrence on qualification and regulator-facing conclusions.
• Build technical leadership while collaborating across a multidisciplinary reactor development organization.

• Develop and maintain the KRONOS Fuel Qualification Statistics and Uncertainty Quantification Plan, including confidence requirements, acceptance probabilities, decision rules, and concurrence points.
• Establish defensible sample sizes and population definitions for kernels, TRISO particles, ceramic pellets, manufacturing lots, irradiation specimens, PIE populations, and safety-test specimens.
• Develop methods for estimating defect, particle-failure, fuel-failure, and fission-product-release fractions, including zero-failure and censored datasets.
• Establish uncertainty budgets covering characterization, irradiation conditions, PIE measurements, material properties, safety testing, and derived qualification parameters.
• Define statistical requirements for model calibration and validation, bias evaluation, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty propagation, applicability limits, and experimental comparison.
• Develop design-of-experiments, process-capability, variability, sampling, and acceptance methods supporting repeatable production-intent fuel.
• Evaluate data exclusions, outliers, missing data, anomalous observations, and extrapolations.
• Author clear statistical conclusions and uncertainty statements supporting fuel qualification and licensing documentation.

• Advanced degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Reliability Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Materials Science, or a closely related quantitative discipline.
• 5+ years supporting nuclear fuel, materials qualification, reliability, manufacturing qualification, model validation, or another safety-critical technical program.
• Expertise in design of experiments, acceptance sampling, uncertainty propagation, reliability methods, statistical inference, and model calibration or validation.
• Experience developing statistical approaches before data collection and working with sparse,…