Spring Break
Burchill says nuclear interest is expanding
By: Nathan Ball
Issue date: 9/10/08 Section: News
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He said his election to the head of the professional organization was a tremendous honor.
"The core purpose of ANS is to promote awareness and understanding of the application of nuclear science and technology," Burchill said. "ANS is the recognized credible advocate advancing and promoting nuclear science and technology."
ANS was chartered as a professional organization within the National Academy of Sciences in 1954. There are 11,000 engineers, scientists, administrators and educators and 1,600 corporations and government agencies in the field of nuclear science and engineering.
"I have always been intrigued with the idea of atomic physics and technology," Burchill said, "even when I was very young."
Burchill was born in a hospital on the south side of Chicago, six blocks from the University of Chicago's old Stagg Field, where Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists demonstrated the first successful nuclear fission experiment.
After graduating from high school in 1960, Burchill enrolled at the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, in Rolla, Mo., where he studied metallurgical engineering with a nuclear option. There were no undergraduate nuclear engineering programs at the time.
After finishing his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1970, he took a job with Combustion Engineering, one of four companies that built the nuclear reactors in the U.S. at the time, move to Conn.
Burchill said the Three Mile Island (TMI) reactor failure in 1979 was a shock to the technical community. Burchill and others were asking how could this have happened.
Burchill was assigned to a team to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent future accidents.
"The analysis I did found answers to those questions," Burchill said. "I wasn't the only person working on this, but I was one of the earliest, and one of the first to publish my conclusions. There were a string of equipment and instrument failures, but the operator misinterpreted the readings at the controls and starved the core of cooling water."
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