NE101: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering

About this course

My name is William Roysdon Murray, and welcome to Nuclear Engineering 101! There's not many online resources available online for getting started with Nuclear Engineering, so I made my own! I first learned about nuclear fission in my high school Chemistry class, and I had hundreds of questions for my teacher after that lesson - Why does both splitting an atom and fusing two atoms both produce energy? Can you make infinite energy from splitting and fusing atoms over and over again? Why are we not using more nuclear power to fight climate change when it makes so much energy without carbon dioxide? How do we have so many nuclear power plants but none of them use fusion technology?Well, I went to NC State University for about 6 years to study Nuclear Engineering and get my questions answered, and it put me about $86,000 in student debt by the time I was done. Not everyone has the time or the money for that! If you're interested in Nuclear Engineering but its not taught at your school, or you don't want to go through the hassle of enrolling in a university again, this course is for you! I've developed this course based off my first year of nuclear courses at NC State, even using the same textbook - Fundamentals of Nuclear Engineering by Shultis and Faw. My lectures will guide you through the physics concepts covered in each chapter, and the textbook will serve as your technical guide for modelling the physics with mathematics. I'll even walk you through number crunching the homework problems in Python to show you how to use the textbook to better understand nuclear science!My hope for this course is that you will discover the magic behind nuclear technology and find a specialty within nuclear that you will want to continue studying - I'll tell you where to go next at the the end of the course based on what you like too!Radiation Physics: Classical physi