From May 17-18, students and faculty from the Center for Nuclear Security Science and Policy Initiatives (NSSPI) travelled to New Mexico to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and participate in the technical exchange meeting of the Southwest Professional Chapter of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM). Dr. Sunil Chirayath, NSSPI director and associate professor of nuclear engineering, and Dr. Evans Kitcher, NSSPI assistant research engineer, accompanied the graduate students on the trip. The graduate students participating in the trip were Hadyn Daugherty, Jeremy King, Dany Mulyana, Ernesto Ordonez-Ferrer, Jeremy Osborn, Mariah Ramirez, Athena Sagadevan, and Charles Schafer. They were joined by three graduate students from the University of New Mexico (UNM).
At LANL, the students visited the Los Alamos History Museum and had the opportunity to attend a training session at the Nuclear Materials Safeguards Training Facility. There they learned how to perform neutron and gamma nondestructive assay of special nuclear material. The training session was coordinated by Dr. James Miller and conducted by Margaret Root.
At the INMM Southwest Chapter Technical Exchange Meeting, three of the NSSPI students—Mulyana, Osborn, and Sagadevan—and one of the students from UNM presented papers. Dr. Chirayath presented a fourth paper from NSSPI written by Yanuar Setiawan as well as a report on the progress of nuclear security and safeguards education at Texas A&M University. Sagadevan was awarded the first ever Dennis Mangan Student Award for her presentation titled, “Proliferation Resistance Evaluation of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment and the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor.”