Carbon-Free Power: The Role of Small Modular (Nuclear) Reactors

Vikram Rao is Executive Director of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium (RTEC), a non-profit in energy founded by Duke University, North Carolina State University, RTI International, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He advises Alchemy Sciences, BioLargo Inc., Clyra Medical Technologies, Cybele Microbiome, Fervo Energy, Obantarla Corp., RTI International, and Sage Geosystems. He retired as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Halliburton Company in 2008 and followed his wife to Chapel Hill, NC, where she was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina. Later that year he took his current position. He is past Chairman of the North Carolina Mining and Energy Commission.

He received his BTech in Metallurgy at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, followed by an MS and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His love of writing commenced as an undergraduate, when he helped found the campus monthly Campastimes and was recognized at commencement for his column Caricatures. His first book with RTI Press, Shale Gas: The Promise and the Peril, was used in nine courses and is on open access. This will be his third title with RTI Press. In the intervening years were two books with Elsevier. Three books, including this one, were co-authored. His fun book of vignettes with Notion Press, A Stranger in No Land: Tales of Assimilation, was released in May 2022.

Chris Gould is an Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Physics Emeritus at North Carolina State University. He served for a decade as Head of the Department of Physics. He later served for seven years as Associate Dean in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and a year as Interim Head of Biological Sciences. He is a nuclear physicist by training, with interests in cosmology, energy research, and science education. He has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BSc from Imperial College, London. He has held visiting appointments at Los Alamos National Laboratory; the Institut fur Kernphysik, Frankfurt; the Atomic Energy Institute, Beijing; the University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran; and the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. As a member of the KamLAND collaboration, he was co-recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “For the fundamental discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations.”