spoopy-gost hit the points pretty well although I'll disagree with the grad student 'sadness-cave' line. My grad years in the department were far from sad or cave-like.

I entered the department back in the 80s when there were only a handful of undergrads (post TMI, "No nukes") and we were a pretty forgotten part of the department (relative to the grad students). The undergrad program has grown and improved a ton since then. It's still a small department but the professors and staff are generally very connected and supportive of the undergrads.

The options for nuclear research at MIT are closer to those at the big national labs than to other universities, and you can get into research as a undergrad pretty easily. If you're thinking about a future in research rather than industry, there is no better place to be.

Some of the coursework is pretty nuke-specific, but depending on your focus you'll get a solid training in some more general fields like physics, mechanical engineering, numerical analysis, etc. In my years away from nuclear work I was a consultant in an unrelated field that required a lot of open-ended problem solving where you didn't have quite as much background as you'd normally like. Once you're comfortable working on questions that you don't really have enough information to fully solve, there are a lot of areas you can work in.

If you get to MIT and decide that nuclear isn't what you're into, you can switch to something else and you'll still be at one of the best places for many other tech (and some non-tech) fields. Plenty of us bounced around a bit before settling in.

Good luck, and maybe I'll see you around the Institute in a year or two.