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 will look at improving the current computational methodologies used to address issues arising from Loss of Offsite Power (LOOP) events. Their project will treat the completeness of analysis, the efficiency of computational estimates, and uncertainty quantification.
The second project is a collaboration with Dr. Matt Fuhrmann, a faculty member in the TAMU Department of Political Science, and Garill Coles of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and seeks to combine the capabilities of professionals in academic nuclear engineering, academic political science, and the DOE complex “to build and apply tools to investigate the unit and system level variables that correlate with the decision and ability of states to acquire sensitive nuclear technologies (e.g., enrichment and reprocessing, ENR).”
This year, the NEUP has awarded over $39 million in funding of to support outstanding, cutting-edge and innovative research at U.S. universities. The program aims to attract the brightest students to the nuclear profession and integrate research and development at universities, national laboratories, and industry to revitalize nuclear education.