PNNL

Nuclear energy has the potential to meet green energy goals both within the United States and abroad. While many technologies are being developed to improve the efficiency and safety of nuclear reactors, certain advancements can have a profound impact on the efficient deployment of nuclear energy.

Amanda Lines is a nationally recognized scientist for her pioneering work in online monitoring, a developing technology that enables researchers and nuclear power plant operators to control nuclear material processing in real-time. Her work is focused on building sensors for harsh chemical environments found in nuclear power plants and nuclear waste.

“These tools pave the way for us to see inside a chemical process in radioactive or harsh environments, which broadens our understanding and provides researchers and operators with the knowledge to design new processes, optimize existing approaches, or simply control a process in real-time,” said Lines.

Lines and her team have developed online tools for a wide variety of uses in the nuclear industry and beyond. For example, her technology has been used to control product quality in used nuclear fuel reprocessing demonstrations, as well as to characterize components of nuclear waste samples in real-time. Lines has also built tools to implement online monitoring at a variety of new processing scales, ranging from small sub-samples to industrial-sized processes. Her work also focuses on microfluidic processes, such as “lab-on-chip” technology, which relies on small sample sizes and reduced radioactivity.

She was awarded the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy Fuel Cycle Research and Development Excellence Award in 2017 for her contributions to the real-time spectroscopic monitoring and characterization of radioactive particles relevant to nuclear reprocessing streams.

She has authored more than 40 research publications, has multiple patents pending, and has been an invited speaker at the Materials Research Society and the Molten Salt Reactor Workshop. She also mentors early-career scientists and hosts undergraduate and graduate students.

More Information

PNNL staff biography

Listen to Amanda Lines talk about on-line monitoring of molten salt reactors

Listen to Amanda Lines being interviewed about molten salt reactor monitoring technology