From C-U to Taipei: Owen Strong expands his nuclear horizons

Any student in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering can be taken to special places, both literally and figuratively.

For NPRE junior Owen Strong, the desire to apply the knowledge learned in the classroom and learn even more led him to Taiwan, where he spent last spring studying abroad at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

Born and raised in Chicago, Strong said he was interested in studying in Taiwan to “get more perspective on how and how nuclear power is perceived in different communities and in different ways” because of the country’s complicated history with nuclear power.

“For me, a lot of the reason why I wanted to study nuclear engineering, and especially going to the power track, was because I thought it was something that I thought, not just, ‘Oh, this is cool science,’” Strong said. “I thought I could help my community with it…thinking about how abstract engineering or scientific concepts…not just how they literally affect people, but how they are perceived by people.”

During his time in Taiwan, Strong was able to visit the country's Low Level Nuclear Waste Repository on outlying Lanyu Island.

“This island has a decent amount of history that I wouldn't be able to explain in a class, let alone an email, but it's part of why nuclear energy has been controversial in Taiwan,” he said. “The nationalist government (pre-democracy) established this low-level nuclear waste repository there…and the island's inhabitants (primarily the indigenous, Polynesian, Tao People as opposed to the Han Mandarin-speaking martial government) themselves were not initially informed or asked for consent on the site during this martial law period.

“Management of the site is part of why the resistance and eventual opposition to the party once elections were held crystallized around opposition to nuclear energy…With a substantial amount of luck, I was able to take a ferry and visit the outlying island and visit the waste site. I gave a driver’s license as collateral, and they had an informational room to visit before actually looking at or taking pictures of the site.”

Strong was also able to visit the research reactor at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The facility there has a TRIGA reactor that began operations around the same time as UIUC’s now-decommissioned reactor. It is currently still used for education/research, including Boron Neutron Capture Therapy.

“I was really impressed with Owen’s independent drive to go and visit Taiwan all by himself on a foreign exchange semester this spring,” NPRE associate professor Katy Huff said. Strong is part of Professor Huff’s Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles research group.

“He took the opportunity to visit corners of the world and other nuclear engineers will likely never see, myself included,” Huff said. “He really embedded himself into the nation was proactive and shared photos of his nuclear-themed bicycle touring adventures with us. He even took a bike ride just to see a nuclear power plant there in Taiwan. This kind of world experience reflects how Owen intentionally builds his understanding of the connection between his work as a nuclear engineer and the broader nation-transforming impacts that nuclear energy can have.”

As for future aspirations, Strong is focused on finishing his undergraduate studies in NPRE and eventually earning his PhD.

“Owen’s work with Oak Ridge (National Laboratory) this past summer so impressed his laboratory mentors that they requested that he be supported to continue working on the project for the remainder of the school year,” Huff said. “We’ve set for some milestones for his work and are already preparing a conference publication. His work is focused on improvements to a real national laboratory production code for neutron transport. This kind of work as well beyond the level of physics and mathematics that a student would be expected to be perform at his stage in his curriculum, but he has had no trouble contributing to this effort.”

Strong said he also hopes to travel to other countries with interesting histories surrounding nuclear and spending time learning about those complicated chronicles.

“No two people's experiences are the same, let alone entire groups and cultures,” he said. “I think, were I to have the opportunity to spend more time internationally, I think I would probably be interested in, getting to know more of those sorts of stories.”