Profile

Hi I’m Adam.

I’m a tritium scientist at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and I live in Newbury. I spent a year living in Melbourne, Australia which is actually where I met my girlfriend! We both enjoy travelling, so try to get abroad whenever we can. We are planning to go back to Australia this year, almost 7 years later.

Growing up, I really enjoyed playing tennis, I recently made the decision to start playing again for the first time in a few years and have loved getting back into it. I try to play competitively when I can and love spending time outdoors being active.

I’ve really got into music over the last couple years and like to relax with my headphones on and listen to albums. There’s not much I don’t listen to, everything from dance to hip hop to classical!

The process of fusing two atoms together produces energy and is called nuclear fusion. If we can make it work at a large scale, then it will be a great clean energy source with an almost unlimited amount of fuel. To produce this energy, we fuse together deuterium and tritium, which are both isotopes of hydrogen. There are lots of problems to solve to make fusion power a reality, but my work at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) deals specifically with tritium. Tritium is a radioactive gas and is tricky to handle so there are lots of challenges to overcome.

We must make sure it can be handled safely, that we can measure it accurately, that we can make it pure, that we know how it will behave under different situations and more! My work might involve building systems to perform experiments on tritium, work out how to measure tritium, work with companies to help them create products which would help us achieve our goals. The job is so varied I couldn’t list everything I do, but everyone at the UKAEA has the same goal – to help make a fusion power plant which can produce clean energy.