Once a year, a community of university professors, students and national lab researchers who focus on nuclear science and security gather to share research updates and develop collaborations, among other tasks.
The group - known as the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium (NSSC) - recently held its workshop at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The NSSC workshop and NSSC advisory board meeting, organized jointly by LLNL and the University of California, Berkeley, was attended by more than 90 university students, postdocs, faculty and national lab scientists from several national labs.
The workshop featured more than 30 oral presentations with overviews of NSSC research areas and highlights of student research projects, along with approximately 25 poster presentations of student research.
During the workshop, Huban Gowadia, the principal associate director for Global Security, gave an overview of the Laboratory and global security challenges in the 21st century. Colonel Jon Baker, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) program manager for the NSSC, provided an overview of the university program.
University students, postdocs, faculty, visitors from other Department of Energy labs and NNSA officials toured six unique LLNL facilities - the National Ignition Facility, the High Explosives Applications Facility, the nuclear forensics lab, the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center, the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and the Additive Manufacturing Lab.
The NSSC was originally established in 2011 by NNSA, which provided a $25 million award for an initial five-year program to develop a new generation of national lab-integrated nuclear experts. Since then, the NSSC has successfully competed for additional five-year programs in 2016 and most recently in 2021 for an award total of $75 million over the 15-year effort.
Partner universities in attendance included: UC Berkeley, Michigan State University, UC Davis, George Washington University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the University of New Mexico, North Carolina State University, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Partner national laboratories in attendance included Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories. Scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory also were in attendance.
The NSSC mission is to train the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers while engaging in research and development spanning basic aspects of new technology and methods to programmatic work directly supporting the nuclear security and nonproliferation mission.
The NSSC has prepared 641 students and postdoctoral scholars through a multidisciplinary program that provides hands-on training in nuclear science, technology and policy. The NSSC has helped graduate 152 Bachelors of Science, 115 Masters of Science and 172 Ph.D. student fellows and affiliates, as well as supported 68 postdoctoral scholars through program completion.
NSSC students, postdocs and faculty collaborate with national lab scientists to conduct cutting-edge research under two main themes: fundamental nuclear sciences, which includes nuclear physics and nuclear data, nuclear chemistry and radiochemistry, and nuclear materials science; and applied nuclear science, which includes nuclear and chemical engineering and radiation detection. These are linked by two crosscutting areas: computing and optimization for nuclear applications and education in nuclear science, technology and policy.
Since 2011, a total of 194 NSSC fellows and affiliates have accepted positions in DOE national labs or other government organizations. Of the NSSC students and postdocs hired at DOE national labs since 2011, 43 have been hired at LLNL, more than any other lab. In 2024, LLNL also hosted 31 NSSC students and postdocs performing research at LLNL in collaboration with LLNL scientists.
During the past 13 years, the NSSC students have demonstrated scientific excellence through the publication of many highly cited manuscripts in influential journals. The consortium has produced some 506 peer-reviewed publications and more than 1,900 oral and poster presentations on fundamental and applied research within the core set of scientific disciplines supporting the nuclear security mission.
In addition to Tomi Akindele and Bethany Goldblum, others who worked to set up the recent NSSC meeting included Lisa Felker, the LLNL nonproliferation R&D program administrator and Ava Benkhatar, the NSSC's program manager.
