Education and Training Series #114: Diamonds are a Reactor’s Best Friend: Novel Sensor to Investigate High-Valence Actinides in Molten Salts
This webinar is part of a series hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group since 2016.
The link to register to this webinar can be found on this page under "about this webinar".
Who should attend?
Policymakers, industry professionals, regulators, researchers, students, the general public.
About the "GIF Education and Training" Webinars
These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.
These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG).
About this Webinar
Molten salt reactors (MSRs) present unique challenges for safeguards and fuel cycle monitoring due to high temperatures, corrosive salts, and complex actinide chemistry. This webinar will introduce a novel boron-doped diamond (BDD) electrochemical sensor for in situ monitoring of actinides in molten chloride and fluoride salt environments. BDD electrodes provide exceptional chemical stability, wide potential windows, and low background currents, enabling high-resolution observation of redox couples—including selective detection of plutonium’s Pu4+/3+ couple. The session will highlight considerations for a possible sensor design, BDD performance in extreme molten salt conditions, and implications for MSR safeguards, pyroprocessing diagnostics, and fundamental actinide electrochemistry.
The 2025 edition of the Pitch Your Generation IV Research competition concluded with first place awarded to Dr Hannah Patenaude (Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States) for “Novel Diamond Sensor to Investigate High-Valence Actinides in Molten Salts”.
The PYG4RC provided PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior engineers with a PhD (completed after 1 January 2023) an opportunity to showcase their research, demonstrate creativity in presenting important technical work, and gain recognition within the nuclear energy community. Nurturing the next generation of talents is essential to advancing Generation IV nuclear energy systems, and this competition highlights their contribution to the future of the field.
Dr. Patricia Paviet from PNNL, USA, member of GIF ETWG will facilitate this webinar. The GIF ETWG webinar series started in 2016 and more than 100 webinars have been streamed since then. People from more than 80 countries have attended these webinars over the years. You can learn more about previous webinars and ETWG activities on the GIF website.
Meet the presenter and moderator
Dr
Hannah PATENAUDE
Dr. Hannah Patenaude is a Director's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Inorganic, Isotope, and Actinide Chemistry group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. As a recent graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Radiochemistry Program, Hannah is experienced in actinide chemistry, specifically electrochemical processes, thermophysical properties measurements, and materials science techniques with an emphasis on molten salt systems to support the safe, secure deployment of Molten Salt Reactors. Outside of the laboratory, Hannah is active in public policy and studies the rhetoric and public perceptions of nuclear technology. She is active in organizations like the American Nuclear Society, serving on the Executive Committee of the Fuel Cycle & Waste Management Division and as the Vice Chair for the Trinity Section. Hannah spends her free time with her dog, Clementine - named after a LANL Manhattan Project era nuclear reactor - who provided support in Hannah’s 2025 Pitch Your Gen IV Research video.
Dr
Patricia PAVIET
Dr. Patricia Paviet was the first chair of the GIF Education and Training Working Group (2015-2024). She now focuses on leading the efforts of the successful GIF Education and Training webinars series and has been doing so since the inception of this initiative in September 2016.
She serves on the GIF MSR pSSC representing the United States since 2021. She joined GIF in November 2015, as chair of the Education and Training Task Force. Outside GIF, Dr. Paviet is the National Technical Director of the Molten Salt Reactor Program for the US Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy. She is managing the research supporting molten salt reactor development across six U.S. national laboratories. She is also a Senior Technical Advisor at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, providing guidance on used nuclear fuel recycling. She has an extensive technical background on the nuclear fuel cycle (front and back end).