UT Part of Consortium Awarded DOE Grant
The University of Tennessee is part of a consortium led by the University of California, Berkeley that was awarded a five-year, $25 million grant by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administrationin December 2025.
This is the fourth time the federal government has awarded such a grant to the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium (NSSC) for research and development in nuclear science, engineering, and security. The NSSC includes six national laboratories and nine universities, including UT.
Work on the new grant began in July 2026. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Professor Mariya Zhuravleva is the principal investigator (PI) of UT’s efforts under the consortium; joint NE-MSE Research Professor Chuck Melcher and NE Assistant Professor Sandra Bogetic are co-PIs.
“This consortium allows us to train the next generation of nuclear engineers and scientists,” Melcher said. “The students are mentored by scientists at the national laboratories as well at their academic homes, and they participate in internships at the national labs. This creates a pipeline from academia to national laboratories.”
Bogetic first joined the NSSC as a graduate student affiliate at UC Berkeley. The consortium has helped her build fruitful research partnerships at national laboratories, leading to several impactful publications and co-mentored graduate students.
“I am an example of how a thoughtfully structured consortium can establish professional relationships that grow into sustained research collaborations,” Bogetic said.
Innovative Scintillators
Melcher, who is also the director of UT’s Scintillation Materials Research Center (SMRC), is co-leading NSSC’s efforts to develop new scintillators (radiation detection materials). With the new grant, the SMRC will be able to expand its efforts to discover and scale up scintillators with different use cases.
UT’s scintillation team will also collaborate with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to identify new processing methods that can be used to optimize scintillators. UT will collaborate with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in building a new neutron imaging facility at ORNL capable of analyzing single-crystal scintillators as they grow.
“For more than five years, MSE and NE will continue to collaborate (with the NSSC) to advance materials for radiation detection and nuclear energy systems,” Melcher said. “Innovation in detector materials is at the core of developing novel detector capabilities.”
Detecting Reactor Misuse
Bogetic will help oversee the consortium’s research into identifying reactor misuse (such as illicit fuel removal) in pebble-bed fission reactors and microreactors.
Her team will first develop a full simulation of the energy signatures of nuclear fuel pebbles in properly operating reactors and microreactors during normal operation, shutdown, and refueling. Next, they will simulate various anomalies and develop approaches that can reliably distinguish between the normal state and misuse scenarios.
To create the simulation, UT will collaborate with LANL, ORNL, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The simulated reactor will be adapted from the model supplied by Kairos Power as part of that company’s ongoing partnership with UT’s NE department.
“My research centers on the safeguards and safety-by-design of advanced reactors,” said Bogetic. “This focus area will mitigate proliferation risks by improving material accountability, advancing anomaly detection, and integrating safety, safeguards, and security by design.”
Contact
Izzie Gall ([email protected])