Luigi Camerano Spelta Rapini

Is the gas too high? What about a new fuel?

We all know that in recent years the cost of energy in Europe has been rapidly growing , fossil fuels are insufficient to face the demand and they have a deep environmental impact. On the other side the renewable energy sources have low efficiency and not solid reliability. The solution could be the use of energy extracted by nuclear reaction, in particular nuclear fission, provided some improvements to nuclear fuels are applied. So, what about a new fuel? How to carry out this research?

Summer of HPC is a PRACE (Patnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) programme in which late-stage undergraduate and master’s students partecipate to a project supported by a mentor. One of this project is ‘Heat transport in novel nuclear fuels‘ mentored by Dominik Legut and supported by IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB. This project focuses on the possibility to use the specific chain of decay of Thorium (Th-cycle) in modern reactors. The main idea of the project is to perform quantum mechanical calculation to describes how the material behaves under extreme condition starting from a microscopically point of view. But stop, who is speaking?

Hi everyone, I’m Luigi Camerano and I’m a physicist! I’m from Italy and I’m studying condensed matter physics at the University of L’ Aquila. I’ve always been very curious, I love wondering why things happen, so when I grew up I chose a scientific career. Then reading some books of Carlo Rovelli like “L’ ordine del tempo” (The order of time), led me to study physics at university and to do a thesis on time evolution in quantum mechanics. The microscopic world, in which things happen in a different way with respect to everyday life, fascinated me and led me to investigate these strange and bizarre features by any possible means: both with pen and paper and with a powerful computer.

Summer of HPC gives me the opportunity to work on a real international project regarding one of the main challenges of our days. Searching through the projects I found the one that perfectly fits with my background and with the knowledge I want to learn. I can’t wait to start working and hopefully to give even a small contribution to face up the big problem of energy demand. I’m really thankful to PRACE and SoHPC organizers for this opportunity!