NSSPI Project Lists

Nuclear Terrorism and Non-Proliferation
Nuclear Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Radiation portal monitors for border crossings.

Tools for combating nuclear terrorism and ensuring homeland security


  • Direction Sensitive Neutron Detectors for Border Monitoring
  • This project is part of a larger 5-year effort to advance the national capability to detect and interdict shielded HEU. These efforts focus on the development of a new detector system capable of detecting the presence, energy, and incoming direction of neutrons.
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  • Inverse Transport for Border Monitoring
  • Radiation portal monitors help prevent illicit trafficking of nuclear material; however, they can also impede legitimate travel and trade with a time-consuming screening process. The algorithm we are developing will allow border agents to identify the location of a radioactive source quickly and accurately so as to reduce the impact on vehicle throughput at border crossings
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  • Motivations of Proliferation
  • Evaluation of the motivations for establishing and pursuing nuclear weapons programs using the case studies of North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Libya, and Ukraine.
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  • Next Generation Nonproliferation Regime
  • This project evaluates the effectiveness of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and advocates a new way forward for nonproliferation negotiations.
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  • Nuclear Weapons Latency
  • Nuclear Weapons Latency refers to the time it would take a state to develop a nuclear weapons capability given its current level of technology, resources available, and priority given to the weapon program. The goal of this project is to develop a quantitative tool that can be used to predict a state's nuclear weapons latency.
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  • SHIELD (Smuggled HEU Interdiction through Enhanced anaLysis and Detection): A Framework for Developing Novel Detection Systems Focused on Interdicting Shielded HEU
  • This project is a five-year, multi-disciplinary effort, led by NSSPI. Its primary goal is to devise and test an innovative framework for evaluating and developing nuclear detection systems based on complete signal and information integration. This framework will lead to predictive knowledge through the integration of optimized radiation detection sensor arrays, radiation transport forward models, inverse analysis, systems and risk analysis, social science components and novel sensor approaches.
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  • State-Level Nuclear Security Measures
  • Development of the capability for a state to perform a detailed analysis of the state-wide nuclear infrastructure and determine that states vulnerability as well as determine where available resources will have the biggest impact to improve the nuclear security of the state.
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