The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Dec. 23 it was renewing a $25 million grant for five more years to a consortium of nine universities for research and development in nuclear science, engineering and security.
The Nuclear Science and Security Consortium (NSSC) will fund $5 million every year for five years to the nine universities. The focus is training “the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers” in new technology and programmatic work methods, an NNSA press release said.
NSSC is led by the University of California, Berkeley. The institutions also part of the consortium are:
- Air Force Institute of Technology
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Michigan State University
- North Carolina State University
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- University of Washington
The universities will partner with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. The focus areas are in low-energy nuclear physics, nuclear chemical engineering, nuclear materials science, nuclear engineering and radiation detection science.
“The goal of the NSSC is to develop professionals with skill sets to tackle fundamental problems in nuclear physics, science and engineering, radiation detection, and more,” Matt Napoli, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, said in the agency’s press release.