Principal Reactor Fuel Engineer – TRISO & Qualification

Protingent; Oak Ridge (TN); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Protingent Staffing seeks a Principal Reactor Fuel Engineer to lead statistical programs for fuel qualification, uncertainty quantification, and model validation at a direct-hire level in Oak Ridge, TN. You will define sampling plans, evaluate defect fractions, and support licensing with rigorous data analysis and documentation.

The role requires an advanced quantitative degree and 5+ years in nuclear fuel or related safety-critical programs, along with strong statistical method development and

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in a quantitative field.
• 5+ years of experience in nuclear fuel, materials qualification, reliability, manufacturing qualification, or safety-critical programs.
• Experience in design of experiments, acceptance sampling, uncertainty propagation, reliability methods, statistical inference, and model calibration or validation.
• Experience developing statistical methods before data collection and defending conclusions based on sparse, censored, zero-failure, or heterogeneous datasets.
• Proficiency with controlled statistical-computing workflows and documenting calculations, software, data transformations, assumptions, and reviews.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain Fuel Qualification Statistics and Uncertainty Plan, including confidence, acceptance probabilities, decision rules, and concurrency points.
• Establish defensible sample sizes and population definitions for kernels, TRISO particles, FCM pellets, and irradiation specimens.
• Define methods for estimating defect and fuel-failure fractions, including censored data handling.
• Establish uncertainty budgets for characterization, irradiation conditions, measurements, materials properties, and safety testing.
• Define statistical requirements for model calibration, validation, bias evaluation, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty propagation.
• Develop design-of-experiments, process-capability, and sampling plans to demonstrate qualification lots represent repeatable production-intent fuel.
• Review data exclusions, outliers, missing data, and extrapolations; craft clear uncertainty statements for licensing documents.

Skills

Design of experiments

Uncertainty propagation

Statistical inference

Model calibration

Data analysis workflows

Technical writing

Education

Advanced degree in Statistics or related quantitative field

Job description

Protingent Staffing seeks a Principal Reactor Fuel Engineer to lead statistical programs for fuel qualification, uncertainty quantification, and model validation at a direct-hire level in Oak Ridge, TN. You will define sampling plans, evaluate defect fractions, and support licensing with rigorous data analysis and documentation.

The role requires an advanced quantitative degree and 5+ years in nuclear fuel or related safety-critical programs, along with strong statistical method development and