Senior Neutronics Engineer - Isotope Production

Role overview Develop and apply neutronics analyses for the design, performance, and safety evaluation of a reactor used for isotope production. The work spans core physics, fuel management, irradiation targets, shielding, and uncertainty analysis, with results informing design decisions throughout the reactor lifecycle. You’ll work closely with specialists across engineering, processing, operations, safety, and licensing in a small team with an iterative workflow.

Responsibilities - Model and optimize reactor cores using Monte Carlo and, where suitable, deterministic neutron transport methods. - Analyze depletion, burnup, reactivity evolution, power distributions, fuel use, and operating cycles. - Assess irradiation targets against isotope yield, purity, activity, heat limits, and production objectives. - Calculate activation, decay, transmutation, neutron and photon source terms, shielding, dose, and decay heat. - Quantify uncertainty and establish design margins; develop and maintain analysis methods, procedures, libraries, and reference models. - Verify and validate methods against experiments, benchmarks, operating data, and independent checks; document assumptions and results for reviews and licensing.

Requirements - Degree in a technical field such as nuclear engineering, with reactor design or analysis experience; graduate education may be preferred. - Fluency in Python and proficiency with high performance computing systems. - Experience with reactor physics and radiation transport analysis. - Strong skills with a neutron transport or reactor analysis suite such as MCNP, Serpent, or SCALE; related modules are recommended. - Ability to develop defensible computational methods, communicate technical findings, and work independently in a rapidly evolving environment.

Nice to have Hands-on experience with irradiation experiments at a research or test reactor. Familiarity with sensitivity and uncertainty methods, shielding calculations, variance reduction, and isotope target optimization is also relevant.