DOE announces $5.9M for university research

The Department of Energy has continued to roll out announcements of Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) awards for fiscal year 2025. Last week, the agency announced the recipients of 11 Consolidated Innovative Nuclear Research Phase II Continuation (CINR II) awards, totaling $5.9 million.

University-led teams with current CINR R&D and Integrated Research Project awards are eligible to apply for CINR II awards, which provide opportunities for teams that have performed high-quality work through NEUP-funded projects to propose new projects that complement and enhance ongoing NEUP research.

"The United States is home to extraordinary nuclear energy visionaries and innovators," said Michelle Scott, acting deputy assistant secretary for strategic crosscuts at the DOE. "Today's awards demonstrate DOE's ongoing commitment that our country's brightest minds have the resources they need to pursue critical lines of inquiry to make the president's bold and ambitious nuclear energy goals a reality."

FY 2025 CINR II projects: Eleven universities will claim awards ranging from $266,000 to $850,000.

• University of Cincinnati-$519,795 for "High-temperature guided wave Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMATs) for structural health monitoring."
• Pennsylvania State University-$450,000 for "Low temperature, ultrafast annealing of nanoscale defects in nuclear graphite."
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology-$500,000 for "ATF solutions to light water-cooled SMRs?"
• Purdue University-$533,333 for "Phase II: Microstructure considerations in creep and creep-fatigue interaction of additively-manufactured 316H stainless steel: mechanisms and modeling?"
• University of Texas at Dallas-$266,666 for "Optimizing hybrid energy storage management for advanced reactor-powered maritime vessels via hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning."
• Mississippi State University-$529,608 for "Calcium phosphates as an effective add-on to backfill materials: Permanent immobilization of iodine and uranium by bentonite/phosphate mineral mixtures."
• University of Texas-Austin-$568,775 for "Development of a nondestructive evaluation technique for automatic inspection of welds in DOE standard canisters."
• Texas A&M University-College Station-$523,793 for "Multiscale modeling and experiments for investigating high burnup LWR fuel rod behavior under normal and transient conditions."
• Pennsylvania State University-$533,333 for "Estimation of low temperature cladding failures during an RIA transient: Phase II validation with HERA results."
• Iowa State University-$666,000 for "Demonstrating industrial readiness of GARS-based ODS ferritic alloys for stability in extreme environments."
• State University of New York-Stony Brook-$850,000 for "Reduction, mitigation, and disposal strategies for the graphite waste of high temperature reactors."

Timing of the announcements: The FY 2025 NEUP and Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) award announcements have come later than usual, with $52.8 million in funds being released on March 3. As a result, some U.S. universities limited the number of students being admitted due to uncertainty about whether funds would be available to support tuition and stipends.