Profile

Don’t worry, its totally safe to stand there!

Originally from London but have been living in Manchester long enough to pick up a bit of the local twang. I came to Manchester for my chemistry degree and stayed to complete a PhD in nuclear chemistry.

I love the history and art of Manchester and Salford and there’s always a new gallery or museum exhibit to visit. When I need to escape the big city you’ll find me at a farmers market or antiques fair in the lake district.

Nuclear reactors burn uranium in the same way a coal station would burn coal to produce heat, drive a turbine and make electricity. However, once this uranium has been burnt it is known as ‘spent’ fuel and spent fuel is very radioactive. So any materials which come into contact with spent nuclear fuel will be irradiated and this process leads to chemical changes like corrosion. It’s my job to work out if the materials used to contain nuclear material, such as steel or concrete, can withstand the radiation they will experience without breaking.

As a postdoc researcher my hours are pretty flexible. I usually start work about 10am and will read emails or look up research papers and try to understand any results I might have collected that week. I try to be in the lab in the afternoons and will either run an electrochemical experiment or look at samples on a microscope.

In electrochemistry we apply a voltage to a solution and measure the current which passes between two electrodes. The current tells us how quickly the electrode will corrode.

But I much prefer using a microscope to see whether a sample, which has been exposed to radiation, has corroded or not. You get to look at lots of nice pictures!