Anubhav Wadehra: Using Molten Salts to Develop a More Sustainable World
For 20 years, the small city of Chandigarh, India, charged his curiosity for science.
Anubhav Wadehra graduated from Punjab Engineering College in 2017 with his bachelor’s in materials and metallurgical engineering. During a six-month internship in 2016 at Boston University, he decided to take his curiosity even further.
“When I came here, it was a completely different experience for me from what I was doing back home,” said Wadehra. “It was a lot of new, advanced nano technology stuff, and here I was asked to do all these things without much concern or inhibition. They just gave me the freedom to start working on this stuff. And I’m a very hands-on person, and I’m an experimentalist and I love doing that. And it was such a surreal experience.”
As of 2021, Wadehra is a doctoral candidate in BU’s Materials Science and Engineering. His goal is to use his skills to change the world––one atom at a time.
Wadehra works with Dr. Karl Ludwig and his materials X-ray diffraction group, and most of his research happens in the sub-nanometer regime. There are other projects where the group looks at surface phenomena using hard X-rays.
Wadehra specializes in molten salts, or ionic compounds in the liquid phase. One example is sodium chloride (table salt), melted above 801 degrees Celsius. The salts Wadehra’s working with are for nuclear reactors and other energy generation and storage applications.
If temperatures inside a nuclear reactor start to increase, the atoms in the molten salt and fuel mixture shift further away. This automatically brings the nuclear reaction to a halt without the need for human intervention.
“So [nuclear meltdowns as seen in] Fukushima and Chernobyl theoretically will not happen,” said Wadehra. “It’s supposed to be a lot safer.”
He and his team are working on another project with similar salts which can be used for extracting and refining metal.
Metal production and extraction technology is based on burning coal, producing harmful greenhouse gasses, requiring oxygen for fuel combustion. It’s not a sustainable process to get important materials.
Wadehra explained, “I find this particularly interesting because, right now, the technology that we have is burning coal and producing a lot of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and you need oxygen to make that reaction happen. So it’s not the best way to get these very important materials.”
But with these molten salts, there’s a method called electrolysis that doesn’t require oxygen. This makes outer space mining possible––on planets, on asteroids––which have crucial materials and metals within them. Based on the chosen reaction, oxygen can also be a possible byproduct.
“Let’s say you’re mining on Mars,” Wadehra said. “You’re creating oxygen that we need… So [molten salt] is a very wide-ranging material with a lot of different applications––you can even store energy with it.”
Wadehra has worked in two of the 17 national Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories in the U.S. For any three days during the semester, he collects data for his PhD thesis at Brookhaven National Lab in Long Island. For half of this past summer, he helped set up a custom Raman spectroscope and conducted research on uranium-filled salts at the Argonne National Lab near Chicago.
Normally, the molten salts he studies don’t have fuel––usually uranium or thorium––because of the hazards and regulations around working with such radioactive materials. But at the Argonne National Lab, he had the opportunity to work with uranium-fueled salt.
Wadehra is used to dealing with X-ray technology. This is more vibrational spectroscopy––a very different technique. He explains that it adds to his skill set, and that it is very different from what he’s been working on for his project at BU.
Wadehra plans to graduate by the end of this school year. He explained that it would be a short PhD, but he had wasted no energy––he immediately delved into experiments in his first semester. Always drawn to science and engineering, he realized he had a soft spot for learning and helping others learn, too.
“Career wise, I do love teaching. I’ve taught once every year and I’m probably going to teach next semester again. And I would like to teach in the future,” Wadehra said. “But I think before getting into teaching, I would like to use my engineering skills to help build something that can make this world safer and more sustainable.”
By Chloe Cramutola