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Nuclear is a really efficient way to produce energy, but it does produce waste that we aren’t 100% sure what to do with, and because it’s radioactive it doesn’t just go away. There is lots of waste being stored in ponds from the 1950s and ’60s, and over time this has made a sludge. Which is probably as gross as it sounds. Luckily I don’t work with the sludge!

As we know roughly what is in the sludge, I can use computer models, and get my supercomputer to do some very complicated maths to try to find out what is exactly in the sludge. That way the government and other scientists can come up with a plan to get rid of it.

The posh way of saying that is I am a Computational Chemist, but people tend to run scared if I describe my job like that.

The first thing I do when I get to work is turn my computer on and log into my super computers. The super computers I use speak a different “language” to my normal computer so I have to access them through something called a shell which lets me type in their language, but I can still use the rest of my computer normally.

Once I’m logged in I check any calculations I had running when I left the day before. If it’s been a good day they will all have worked and I can have a look at the results- sometimes this is just a list of numbers, other times it’s a little video of how the molecule wiggles around. If it’s been a bad day then some will have failed so I have to figure out why they have failed and re-run the calculations. While this sounds like a massive pain, if they fail it’s normally for the same reason, or at least one of the reasons I have come across before.

I’ll run any new calculations after having done this. Depending on the calculation I’m running it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of days to finish. In fact I have run calculations that have taken a month to complete. This gives me a chance to check my emails, talk to my supervisor about what is working and what isn’t working and grab a coffee.

My calculations just run in the background.

As I’m still learning a lot of my day is spent reading what other researchers have done before and making sure I understand it. This helps me plan what I’m going to do next, and make sure I’m not just repeating someone else’s mistakes.

Quite often I will have a report to write on the research I have done, or a presentation to prepare or even a poster to write. My work is part of a national group project to do with Nuclear Sludge that meets every 6 months to discuss our progress which is where the presentations and posters come in.

What’s great about computational chemistry is that my experiments carry on without me. I can go to a meeting or be at a conference for a day with my calculations running in the background. Science never stops!