A Summer at PPPL

I’ve got a job. My first job. And it is freaking awesome. Well, it’s kind of a job. Technically it’s a paid internship, but I guess there’s really not that much of a difference. Anyway, I’m being paid to research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. I’m working on developing technology that will allow tokamak reactors to have liquid lithium flow over the inside wall of the reactor without the reactor breaking. (For the physics nerds, the lithium chemically captures low energy hydrogen that has escaped confinement and pumps it out of the system. This prevent the low energy hydrogen from re-enetering the high energy plasma and lowering it’s temperature.)It’s not quite the plasma physics I was hoping to do when I came here, more of mechanical engineering and materials science, but hey, I’m still as happy as can be, curious, and excited.How cool is that?