Today, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States, more than any other country in the world, and these units collectively provide about 20 percent of the country’s electricity. According to Dean Price, this is a great achievement, but he believes that our country needs nuclear power much more, especially at a time when alternatives to fossil fuel based power plants are desperately being sought. This is why he became a nuclear engineer – to ensure that nuclear technology is up to the task of providing it in this time of critical need.
“Nuclear energy has been a tremendous part of our nation’s energy infrastructure for the last 60 years, and the number of people maintaining that infrastructure is incredibly small,” says Price, an assistant professor at MIT in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) as well as the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies. “By becoming a nuclear engineer, you become one of the few people responsible for carbon-free energy production in the United States.”
This was a mission he was eager to participate in, and the goals he set for himself were far from modest: he wanted to help design and introduce a new class of nuclear reactors based on the safety, economy, and reliability of the existing nuclear fleet.
Price has never wavered from this goal, and has received only encouragement along the way. The nuclear engineering community, he says, is “small, close-knit and very welcoming. Once you’re in, most people aren’t inclined to do anything else.”
shed light on relationships between physical processes
In his first research project as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana in Champaign, Price studied the safety of steel and concrete casks that were used to store reactor fuel rods after they were cooled in water tanks, typically for several years. Their analysis indicated that this storage method was quite safe, although the question of what should ultimately be done with these fuel casks in terms of long-term disposal remains open in this country.
After beginning graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 2020, Price pursued a different line of research in which he remains engaged today. That field of study, called multiphysics modeling, involves looking at the different physical processes going on at the core of a nuclear reactor to see how they interact – an alternative to studying these processes one at a time.
A major process, neutronics, concerns how neutrons spun in the reactor core lead to nuclear fission, which generates electricity. A second process, called thermal hydraulics, involves cooling the reactor to remove the heat generated by the neutrons. A multiphysics simulation, analyzing how these two processes interact, could show how the heat taken away by the reactor while generating electricity affects the behavior of neutrons, because the hotter the fuel, the less likely it is for fission to occur.
“If you ever want to change your power level, or do anything with the reactor, fuel temperature is a critical input you need to know,” says Price. “Multiphysics modeling allows us to correlate fission neutronics processes with thermal properties, such as temperature. In turn, this can help us predict how the reactor will behave under different conditions.”
Prices says multiphysics modeling for light water reactors, which are operating today with capacities up to 1,000 megawatts, is very well established. But methods for modeling advanced reactors – small modular reactors (SMRs with capacities ranging from about 20 to 300 MW) and microreactors (rated from 1 to 20 MW) – are much less advanced. Only a small number of these reactors are in operation today, but Price is focusing his efforts on them because of their greater flexibility in power and size, as well as their ability to produce electricity more cheaply and more safely.
Although multiphysics simulations have provided abundant information to the nuclear community, they may require supercomputers to solve coupled and extremely difficult nonlinear equations or find their approximate solutions. In hopes of drastically reducing the computational burden, Price is actively exploring artificial intelligence approaches that can provide similar answers while bypassing those cumbersome equations altogether. This has been a central theme of his research agenda since joining the MIT faculty in September 2025.
Important role of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning methods, in particular, are good at finding hidden patterns within data, such as relationships between variables critical to the functioning of a nuclear plant. For example, Price says, “If you tell me the power level of your reactor, it [AI] Can tell you what the temperature of the fuel is and can even tell you the 3-dimensional temperature distribution in your core. And if this can be done without solving any complex differential equations, the computational cost can be reduced significantly.
Price is investigating several applications where AI could be particularly useful, such as helping with the design of new types of reactors. “We can then rely on security frameworks developed over the last 50 years to conduct security analysis of the proposed design,” he says. “This way, the AI won’t interfere directly with anything security-critical.” As he sees it, the role of AI will be to enhance established processes, not replace them, but to help fill existing gaps in knowledge.
When a machine-learning model is given a sufficient amount of data to learn from, it can help us better understand the relationships between key physical processes – again without solving nonlinear differential equations.
“By really strengthening those relationships, we can make better design decisions in the early stages,” Price says. “And as that technology is developed and deployed, AI can help us make more intelligent control decisions that will enable us to operate our reactors safer and more economically.”
Giving back to the community that raised him
Simply put, one of his main goals is to bring the benefits of AI to the nuclear industry, and he sees the potential as vast and largely untapped. Price also believes that as a professor at MIT he is well-positioned to bring us closer to the nuclear future he envisions. As he sees it, he is not only working to develop the next generation of reactors, but also helping to prepare the next generation of leaders in the field.
Price became acquainted with some potential members of that “next generation” in a design course he co-taught last fall with Curtis Smith, a KEPCO professor of nuclear science and engineering practice. For Price, this introduction only lasted a few months, but it was long enough for him to learn that MIT students are exceptionally motivated, hard-working, and capable. It’s no surprise that these are the same qualities he’s hoping to find in students joining his research team.
Price clearly remembers the support she received when taking her first, tentative steps into the field. Now that he has advanced from undergraduate to professor, and has acquired a vast store of knowledge along the way, he wants his students to “experience the same feeling that I had when I entered this field.” Beyond his specific goals of improving the design and operation of nuclear reactors, Price says, “I hope to maintain the same fun and healthy environment that made me fall in love with nuclear engineering in the first place.”
