UC Berkeley to lead in training future nuclear security scientists

The US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded a five-year, $25 million grant to a consortium of academic organizations, headed by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), to train graduate and undergraduate students for work in nuclear security and nonproliferation. The National Science and Security Consortium will also involve Michigan State University; UC Davis; UC Irvine; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Washington University in St. Louis, in Missouri. The students will participate in nuclear security R&D projects at the DOE-owned Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national weapons laboratories. Anne Harrington, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nonproliferation, said the UCB collaboration beat out several bids submitted by other university teams in response to NNSA’s request for proposals. The consortium will train students in nuclear physics and chemistry, radiation chemistry, nuclear engineering, instrumentation, and public policy. Although NNSA annually funds about $15 million worth of research at US universities, those projects involve directed R&D, with the academic partner performing research for one of the three weapons laboratories. The new collaboration will be ‘exploratory and, we hope, very innovative,’ she said. ‘If we don’t keep the vital pipeline of talent coming into our laboratories, and more importantly, if we don’t excite a new generation about the importance of working on nuclear security and nonproliferation issues, it doesn’t matter how beautiful our facilities are; we will not be able to do the work that must be done.’

Referring to the collaboration, Per Peterson, chair of UCB’s nuclear engineering department, said that ‘coordinating efforts at the partnering universities and creating linkages with national laboratories will give students the opportunity to gain a much broader interdisciplinary perspective on why their research matters and what it’s going to be able to do.’ Interest in nuclear engineering and science has ‘grown enormously over the past several years,’ he said, and his students tell him they think they have an opportunity to change the world’s future. The consortium goes well beyond the typical “stovepiped environment” of small grants to principal investigators. Through the consortium, participating faculty members from engineering, chemistry, physics, and public policy departments plan to collaborate in a fashion that mirrors the interdisciplinary model at national laboratories. If a public policy–related question were to come up, a teleconference could be arranged with officials at NNSA, the Department of State, or other relevant agencies.Nuclear resonance fluorescence One topic of investigation for the consortium is nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) for the detection of nuclear materials. The technology, in which gamma-ray photons with the appropriate energy can generate fission in uranium, could provide a new method for detecting nuclear materials in locations that are very difficult to monitor by other means and would also be capable of identifying the specific isotope that is present. ‘A whole host of applications’ could further ensue from developing NRF, Peterson said, such as in verifying arms control agreements, in which inspectors must ascertain the presence of a warhead without disclosing classified design information. Another topic the consortium may explore is the growing risk of uranium ore concentrates being diverted to terrorists or rogue nations, Harrington noted. The risk is heightened by the high levels of corruption that may exist in developing countries where uranium is mined. That situation ‘gives us a natural opportunity to engage a broad set of countries in very low-level, fundamental, nuclear-forensics materials analysis and characterization using uranium as the base, but in a form that is completely nonsensitive,’ she said. ‘So we can explore things like geological watermarking. We can explore different ways of developing and controlling databases on things like uranium ore concentrates.’ Scientific advances from that work might be transferred into the highly sensitive field of post-detonation nuclear forensics, she added. Over the program’s five years, 230 students are expected to be trained by the program, Harrington said. Six graduate students will be enrolled at UCB initially, with that number doubling in later years, Peterson said.

David Kramer