MIT is one of nine partners in a new Nuclear Energy Innovation Hub announced by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman on May 28.The Hub, also known as the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), will be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in addition to MIT includes partners from universities, industry and other national labs. It will use advanced capabilities of the world's most powerful computers to make significant leaps forward in nuclear reactor design and engineering.A major focus of the MIT researchers will be to model the behavior of key materials such as fuel and fuel cladding together with energy generation and transport processes so as to provide better estimates of how these materials will perform within the extreme environment of a nuclear reactor. The Nuclear Energy Innovation Hub will receive up to $122 million over five years and is the first of three Hubs expected to be announced by the Department of Energy this year.The MIT team is led by three Nuclear Science and Engineering professors: the Principal Investigator (PI) Mujid Kazimi, director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Studies; and the co-PIs, professors Sidney Yip and Jacopo Buongiorno. The Oak Ridge-based Innovation Hub will be guided by a Board of Directors headed by Professor Ernest Moniz of the MIT Energy Initiative on which Kazimi will also serve. The MIT team brings together faculty and research staff from nuclear science and engineering (professors Benoit Forget and Bilge Yildiz and Dr. Aydin Karahan, as well as Kazimi, Yip, and Buongiorno), materials science and engineering (professors Michael Demkowicz and Jeff Grossman), and civil and environmental engineering (Prof. John Williams).