The Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, part of the Tickle College of Engineering, carries the university's 📝fusion work across three themes — plasma-materials interactions, fusion structural materials, and 📝blanket and fuel cycle research.
Its relationship with 📝Oak Ridge National Laboratory is institutional rather than incidental, formalized through the UT–ORNL Governor's Chair program that gives senior faculty joint appointments across both. Brian D. Wirth, TVA Department Chair and UT–ORNL Governor's Chair Professor of Computational Nuclear Engineering since 2010, publishes with an ORNL Fusion Energy Division affiliation alongside his Knoxville one; Steven Zinkle holds the Governor's Chair for Nuclear Materials. In January 2025 Zinkle won a $20 million Department of Energy FIRE Collaboratives award for the Integrated Materials Program to Accelerate Chamber Technologies (IMPACT), which aims at the first ASME code qualification for fusion structural materials, with ORNL, MIT, UC Santa Barbara, Idaho National Laboratory and others as partners.
The department's fusion output divides cleanly between calculation and measurement. Its 📝plasma-materials group modeled subsurface gas dynamics in the 📝ARC 📝divertor under prolonged 📝detachment (Fusion Science and Technology, 2026; doi:10.1080/15361055.2026.2635253) — a simulation of a machine not yet built. Its diagnostics work, by contrast, is measured hardware: a fiber optic 📝bolometer was demonstrated on a tokamak plasma for the first time at 📝DIII-D in 2022, holding noise at 0.39 mK during plasma operations against 0.38 mK on the bench and so showing negligible electromagnetic interference (Review of Scientific Instruments 93, 123515), and surface-eroding thermocouples resolved multiple heat-flux components at the DIII-D divertor target.