The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semiautonomous agency within the Department of Energy, is awarding $27.5 million in grants to universities and colleges to conduct research related to stockpile stewardship or to maintenance of the US nuclear weapons inventory. Everet Beckner, the agency’s deputy administrator for defense programs, said the grants are part of the NNSA’s stewardship science academic alliances program and contribute to “the science which underpins the NNSA stewardship of the nuclear weapons stockpile. These grants are also a key means of training the scientists needed to maintain the outstanding capabilities of our national laboratories.”
The grants will fund such projects as “nuclear probing of dense plasmas” at MIT, and “measurement of fission neutron multiplicities and energy spectra for actinide nuclei” at Oregon State University. According to the NNSA the grants are also intended to strengthen the agency’s relationship with university scientists.
