November 1, 2011
During the week of October 24-28, a group of TAMU Nuclear
Engineering students visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
in Oak Ridge, TN, to participate in the "Non-Destructive Assay
(NDA) Applications for International Safeguards" practical short
course at ORNL's Safeguards Laboratory as part of the
"Radiation Detection and Nuclear Material Measurements" class at
TAMU (NUEN-605).
The class consisted of both lectures and valuable hands-on
experience with safeguards instrumentation and software, providing
the students with practical understanding of a number of NDA
techn...
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October 12, 2011
The International Affairs Fellowship in Nuclear Security
(IAF-NS), sponsored by the Stanton Foundation, offers
university-based scholars valuable hands-on experience in the
nuclear security policymaking field and places researchers in U.S.
government positions or international organizations for a period of
twelve months to work with practitioners. The IAF-NS closes the gap
between research and practice and enriches the teaching and
scholarship of academics, while also benefiting policymakers by
exposing them to cutting-edge scholarly research.
CFR will award two fellowships in 201...
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September 29, 2011
Dr. Paul Nelson, NSSPI Associate Director for International
Programs, was awarded over $1.1 million in research grants from the
Department of Energy's Nuclear Engineering University Program
(NEUP).
The projects chosen for award were "Improved Safety Margin
Characterization of Risk from Loss of Offsite Power" and
"Correlates of Sensitive Technologies."
For the first project, Dr. Nelson will be working with NSSPI
faculty member Dr. Sunil Chirayath, along with Ernie J. Kee and
Shawn S. Rodgers of the South Texas Nuclear Project Operating
Company's Risk Management group. They...
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September 19, 2011
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a project
proposed by NSSPI faculty member, Dr. Sunil Chirayath, along with
Dr. David Boyle, NSSPI Deputy Director, and Dr. Charles M. Folden,
III, of the TAMU Cyclotron Institute, to receive an award under the
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) Academic Research
Initiative. The award in the amount of $378,464 is for the first
year of a multi-year project to assess whether or not it is
possible to reliably predict and measure a unique, intrinsic
physical signature in weapons-grade plutonium produced in reactors
of foreign nuclea...
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September 13, 2011
From August 26 -30, NSSPI faculty member Dr. Craig Marianno and
Dr. Sunil Khatri from the TAMU Department of Electrical
Engineering, along with NSSPI graduate students Matthew Grypp and
Gentry Hearn, traveled to the Port of Tacoma to conduct gamma
measurement experiments at the port's Rail Test Center. This work
is part of the multi-disciplinary SHIELD (Smuggled HEU Interdiction
through Enhanced anaLysis and Detection) project, and the data
collected will aid researchers in developing detector systems to be
used in border monitoring, specifically in detecting radiological
materials ...
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