Nuclear engineering education in Brazil: Review and prospects

Abstract

Half a century of focused nuclear education in Brazil has resulted in the expansion of applications of nuclear technique in many fields, such as power generation nuclear power plants, environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics and treatments, food irradiation, new materials development using irradiation, archaeological dating, hydrological studies, and so on. Nuclear research is blooming and evolving in Brazil. In the last three years, two master’s degrees and one doctorate have been approved by the Ministry of Education. The scientific capacity building has been enlarging and improving the reservoir of qualified personnel who Brazil expects to operate the current infrastructure and other facilities to be settled in the near future. Only graduate programs allocated by CAPES (Ministry of Education) and CNPq (Ministry of Science & Technology) in the Nuclear Engineering Area (Engenharia II) are considered in this paper. In Brazil, there are also Physics and hybrid graduate programs in what DSc degrees are pursued using nuclear and nuclear-related techniques; CAPES and CNPq do not allocate them in the nuclear engineering area, following their own criteria, since those programs have their own peers, budget and evaluation area.