L to R: Senator Sean Edwards, Jeff Terry

Jeff Terry, professor of physics, recently served as an external reviewer for Australian Senator Sean Edwards’ South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Commission report.

The report, “Transforming Our Economy. Cleaning Our Energy. Sustaining Our Future. Submission to the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission,” discusses how South Australia is ideally placed to take a prominent global position in servicing the large and growing market that exists in Asia to provide management services for used nuclear fuel. It proposes a model of services based on providing custody of used fuel, rather than disposal, and commercialization of the infrastructure required to undertake complete recycling of the material while generating zero-carbon electricity.

Terry has spoken in the past at the University of Adelaide in South Australia on the economics of small modular nuclear reactors and their potential affect in mitigating climate change. He met with Senator Edwards during his last trip to Adelaide, where they discussed economically viable means of procuring reactors that can be used to close the nuclear fuel cycle and solve nuclear waste issues, thereby providing clean electricity. Terry said, “It is an honor to work with a politician as forward thinking as Senator Edwards. His proposal to use the world’s nuclear waste to provide no cost electricity to his constituents is a bold solution with benefits to multiple countries in Southeast Asia.”

Terry specializes in utilizing synchrotron radiation techniques to analyze materials’ properties. Terry has worked for IIT’s Materials Research Collaborative Access Team (MRCAT) beamline at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source. He also worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he received a Science and Technology Award for his work on the measurement of the electronic structure of plutonium. Terry has a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford University and a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Chicago. His team’s two-volume EPIC report on the manufacturing of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors can be found here.