One Opportunity at a Time
By Vishva Nalamalapu, Office of the Chancellor
In the fall of 2020, just a handful of students could be heard on Washington State University Pullman’s normally buzzing campus. Though only a first-year student at the time, John Bussey (’25 Mat. Sci. & Eng., Math. minor) was one of them.
Students needed a reason to be on campus in these early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Bussey’s reason was doing research in the lab of John McCloy, the director of the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. In high school, Bussey had contacted McCloy and visited his lab. He knew he wanted to get involved in research right away, and he told McCloy as much. So, he was able to begin studying how to prevent nuclear waste from harming human and environmental health in the McCloy lab the weekend before classes began and has been there ever since.
From 1944 to 1989, the Hanford Site in Washington produced plutonium for World War II and Cold War atomic bombs. The nuclear waste from that production is now contained in 177 water-tower-sized tanks. The tanks, however, are only a temporary fix. The nuclear waste needs to be stored in a material that will last at least 10,000 years — until its radioactivity is reduced to that of background levels.
The McCloy lab’s research includes developing such a material — glass — that can store the waste, all 55 million gallons of it. Bussey’s senior thesis focused on how adding two elements of nuclear waste, uranium and thorium, to glass affects its properties.
Bussey began by adding the ingredients for glass and nuclear waste to a furnace with lava-like temperatures. He poured the resulting liquid out and it cooled into glass, sometimes fluorescent orange from the uranium. Then he used instruments to analyze which elements made up the glass and how they were positioned relative to each other.
“I find the day-to-day really fun,” says Bussey. Not only is it fun, but, he says, “We learn things people didn’t know before.” And that information is applied to how people at Hanford store nuclear waste.
Through his thesis and the many other research projects he has been a part of, Bussey has learned about the field of material science and how to advance it. He has presented at international conferences, taken graduate classes, and trains students on instruments. “He is an expert on certain pieces of equipment that nobody else can run,” says McCloy.
A large part of Bussey’s success is due to his enthusiasm and diligence. He’s taken every opportunity he’s gotten, an approach that makes him a perfect fit for McCloy’s lab. “I give students opportunities, and, if they take advantage of those, then they get more,” says McCloy.
Bussey has a long, promising career ahead of him. But, for now, he’ll take it one opportunity at a time.