Fundamental physics research at the University of Texas at Austin will get a $7 million boost from the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is funding the work under a 16 year-old program aimed at providing people with the technical qualifications to maintain U.S. nuclear weapons.
The grant came from the NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliances program, which is funded through the Energy Department agency’s Defense Programs office. “The program helps develop the next generation of highly trained technical scientists and engineers for the Nuclear Security Enterprise,” the NNSA said last week in a press release.
The NNSA grant to the University of Texas at Austin Center for Astrophysical Plasma Properties will be doled out over five years, putting its average annual value at $1.4 million.
With the funding, the university will study “atomic and radiation physics of matter in a wide range of temperatures and densities,” according to the NNSA release. Such studies are relevant to the agency’s mission to keep U.S. nuclear weapons at their advertised destructive capacity: something that since the end of the Cold War, the Department of Energy has done without conducting nuclear-explosive tests.
The University of Texas is leading one of three confirmed bids on a contract — potentially worth more than $20 billion over 10 years, with up to $50 million in annual fees — to manage the NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. The northern New Mexico facility is the nation’s oldest nuclear weapons lab and, in addition to supporting maintenance of nuclear weapons it designed during the Cold War, will soon manufacture a share of the plutonium pits that power the first stage of thermonuclear warheads.
