Chad Pope

Dr. Pope has extensive experience in nuclear safety and criticality safety practice within the Department of Energy. His nuclear criticality safety experience began in 1989 when he served as a criticality safety engineer at the Naval Reactors Facility located in Idaho. At the Naval Reactors Facility, he performed the fuel handling criticality safety analysis for D1G-2 naval reactor fuel. In 1991, he began working at Argonne National Laboratory ? West in Idaho. While at Argonne National Laboratory ? West, he served as the in-facility nuclear criticality safety engineer supporting startup and operation of the Fuel Conditioning Facility where used fuel from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II was subjected to pyro-processing. He performed nuclear criticality safety tasks in the Fuel Conditioning Facility from 1991 to 1999. These tasks included developing the fuel handler training program, maintaining the facility criticality safety rules, controlling the nuclear criticality safety aspects of the computerized fuel tracking system, and performing and checking nuclear criticality safety evaluations. In 1999, he transitioned to a nuclear safety role covering all aspects of nuclear safety at the Argonne National Laboratory ? West site. In 2005, the Argonne National Laboratory ? West site became part of the newly designated Idaho National Laboratory. At that time, he became a member of the Idaho National Laboratory nuclear criticality safety group and was assigned as the nuclear criticality safety technical lead for the newly named Materials and Fuels Complex which was formerly the Argonne National Laboratory ? West site. In 2007, he was named the technical lead for nuclear safety at the Materials and Fuels Complex and was also assigned the duty of upgrading the safety basis for the Fuel Conditioning Facility. Within the safety basis upgrade process, he led the work used to justify removal of the criticality alarm system in the Fuel Conditioning Facility. In 2011, he completed a PhD in nuclear science and engineering from Idaho State University. In 2013, he accepted an Associate Professor offer from Idaho State University. He is also jointly appointed to Idaho National Laboratory. While at ISU, Dr. Pope led the EBR-II reactor physics benchmark evaluation for the IRPhEP. He has also led the ISU Component Flooding Evaluation Laboratory where experiments and analysis related to the performance of nuclear power plants under flooding conditions have occurred in support of the DOE LWRS program. This work has also included the study of smoothed particle hydrodynamics applications for flooding analysis.