Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
11/13/2015
Partnerships between universities and national laboratories that support the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation are developing new detection, verification, and network analysis technologies for nonproliferation while promoting a student-to-lab pipeline meant to recruit a new generation of technical experts into the nuclear security enterprise.
A primary goal of these consortia is “to develop the next generation of technical talent in nuclear science and engineering,” David LaGraffe, director of the NNSA’s Office of Proliferation Detection, said Tuesday at the American Nuclear Society’s annual winter meeting. The Nuclear Science and Security Consortium (NSSC) led by the University of California at Berkeley, the Consortium for Verification Technology (CVT) led by the University of Michigan, and the Consortium for Nonproliferation Enabling Capabilities (CNEC) led by North Carolina State University are part of a model that facilitates the integration of the knowledge bases between the academic community and the national laboratories, LaGraffe said. “We want to be able to expose young professionals, students, post-docs, graduate students, to potential careers in nuclear security,” he said.
The NSSC conducts research and development on areas including nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, and nuclear security policy along with several other academic institutions and four primary national lab partners: Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos. One of the projects conducted by UC Berkeley, Sandia, and National Security Technologies explores “how network science can be used to explore the relative proliferation likelihood of a given nation,” according to Bethany Goldblum, NSSC associate director. “It may be possible from these types of models to look at what types of relations most strongly influence states to pursue or avoid nuclear weapons,” she said.
The CVT, which consists of 13 universities and nine national labs, works in the areas of treaty and disarmament verification, safeguard tools, and undisclosed activity detection. In addition to its support for nonproliferation activities, the group also conducts outreach to attract the next generation of technical professionals. CVT Director Sara Pozzi, a nuclear engineering and radiological sciences professor at the University of Michigan, said the team now faces challenges in “detecting clandestine fissile material production" with optimal accuracy, detecting “small-yield explosions anywhere on Earth,” and verifying the dismantlement of warheads without divulging information to inspectors that could be considered classified by states.
Robin Gardner, chief scientist at CNEC and professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University, noted that CNEC focuses on the identification of observables associated with special nuclear material and simulation analysis and modeling methods to detect proliferation. The university representatives also highlighted the university-lab partnerships’ role in recruiting and retaining new technical talent and fostering ties between lab personnel and university students. Pozzi mentioned a national lab research collaboration program that invites scientists from the labs to spend up to two weeks on campus, and Goldblum noted that the NSSC has placed 30 of its students – consortium fellows and affiliates – at national labs, a number that “continues to grow.”
