Residents of Boston need not fear the silver-and-blue helicopters flying low and slowly over the city this weekend. They are there to test the air for unnatural levels of radiation ahead of the Boston Marathon.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST, helicopters routinely overfly cities hosting major events to monitor the air for potential nuclear threats. NEST aircraft will measure expected background radiation as part of standard preparations to protect public health and safety on the day of an event like the Boston Marathon, the Super Bowl and presidential inaugurations in Washington, D.C.
The helicopter will fly in a grid pattern over the areas at 150 feet (or higher) above the ground at a speed of approximately 80 miles per hour through April 17. Flyovers will occur only during daylight hours and are estimated to take approximately two hours to complete per area.
The Navy has begun the long process of defueling the nuclear reactors powering the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, reports Breaking Defense. The Nimitz will be the second carrier the Navy has defueled since the first of the eponymous class of ships was commissioned in 1975.
In its fiscal year 2024 budget request, the Navy extended the Nimitz’s service life by a year to 2026, but dismantling the ship’s twin Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors and disposing of the highly-enriched uranium they contain will require years of preparation to even begin.
Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding, which constructed the 10 Nimitz-class carriers, will help plan the defueling procedures.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP) awarded nine new grants totaling $40.8 million to minority-serving institutions to enhance the diversity of NNSA’s future workforce.
The program now has a total of 33 active partnerships that encompass 56 schools and 14 NNSA laboratories, sites, and plants.
MSIPP’s efforts are designed to support the development of a diverse, highly skilled, and enduring stream of talented students in STEM fields who are working to advance America’s nuclear security agenda, the NNSA said in a statement. MSIPP provides competitive, consortia-based grant awards with a three-to-five-year period of performance.
Doug Kothe, currently associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and director of the Exascale Computing Project, will become chief research officer and associate labs director of the advanced science and technology division at Sandia National Laboratories, according to Inside High-Performance Computing.
Before joining ORNL in 2005, Dr. Kothe spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. He also spent a year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences.
Inside HPC reports he will succeed Susan Seestrom, who is expected to retire in June after serving as chief research officer and associate lab director for Advanced Science and Technology since 2017.
