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Dr. Rodney Ewing, an internationally known authority on the management of radioactive waste and its environmental impact,
will be on campus next week as the 2007 McMaster Visiting Scientist.
Ewing has identified and been granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material that immobilizes nuclear waste
and makes its storage less hazardous.
During his visit to campus, students and faculty will have the opportunity to meet with him and attend his lecture on “The
Nuclear Fuel Cycle vs. the Carbon Cycle: Plutonium vs. Carbon” at 4 p.m. Oct. 2 in 206 Bowen-Thompson Student Union. The event
is open to the public and will be followed by a reception.
Ewing, the Donald R. Peacor Collegiate Professor of Geological Sciences, the William Kerr Professor of Nuclear Engineering
and Radiological Sciences and a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has authored
or co-authored more than 500 research publications and is a founding editor of Elements magazine. He has worked as a scientist
in the United States, Europe, Israel, Japan, Denmark and Russia.
About 17 percent of the world’s electricity is provided by nuclear power, which has only a modest impact on global carbon
emissions, according to Ewing. In order to make a significant and timely impact on those emissions, most analyses suggest
that carbon-free sources, such as nuclear power, would have to expand total energy production by factors of three to 10 by
2050. An increase on this scale has important implications for the production of nuclear waste and the potential for the diversion
of fissile material, Ewing says.
Already, nuclear energy and weapons programs have created more than 1,500 metric tons of plutonium. Each year the amount grows
because of international efforts to reduce dependency on fossil fuel. Ewing’s work toward the development of a material that
will minimize the dangers of storing excess plutonium has received international attention.
His work has been supported by U.S. funding agencies, the European Union and NATO as well as sources in Sweden, Germany, Australia
and Japan.
He has received the Danna Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lomonosov Gold
Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a two-time winner of the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of
Canada.
The McMaster Visiting Scientist program is underwritten by a $250,000 endowment funded by Helen and the late Harold McMaster.
The longtime BGSU benefactors, from Perrysburg, funded the interdisciplinary program to bring eminent scholars or practitioners
from the fields of chemistry, biology, geology, physics or astronomy to the University.
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