Summary
At the request of the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in 2021 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formed the Panel on Assessment of the Center for Neutron Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (the panel) and formulated the following statement of task for the panel:
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Panel on Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research will assess the scientific and technical work performed by the NIST Center for Neutron Research. The panel will review technical reports and technical program descriptions prepared by NIST staff and will visit the facilities of the NIST laboratory. The visit will include technical presentations by NIST staff, demonstrations of NIST projects, tours of NIST facilities, and discussions with NIST staff. The panel will deliberate findings, conclusions, and recommendations in a closed session panel meeting and will prepare a report summarizing its assessment of findings, conclusions, and recommendations.
The assessment shall be responsive to the charge from the NIST Director. The following are the criteria for the assessment:
- The technical merit of the current laboratory program relative to current state-of-the-art programs worldwide;
- The portfolio of scientific expertise as it supports the ability of the organization to achieve its stated objectives;
- The adequacy of the laboratory budget, facilities, equipment, and human resources, as they affect the quality of the laboratory’s technical programs; and
- The effectiveness by which the laboratory disseminates its program outputs.
In order to accomplish this assessment, the National Academies assembled a panel of 10 volunteers, whose collective expertise corresponds well with the research done at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). Owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first NCNR review to be held virtually, and the panel is grateful to the NCNR leadership and staff for their extra work to make this effective. The panel members participated in a virtual review of NCNR on July 20–22, 2021.
NCNR, with a total annual budget of $60 million (about $48 million appropriated by the U.S. Congress and the rest from other sources) and a staff of 202, is one of six major research organizational units consisting of five laboratories and one user facility at NIST.1 It is one of only three neutron scattering user facilities in the United States, with 30 instruments, supporting roughly one-third of the U.S. neutron scattering instruments and users.2,3 Over the 2020 reporting year, NCNR served 3,068
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1 R.Dimeo, NIST, 2021, presentation to the Panel on Assessment of the Center for Neutron Research, July 21.
2 BESAC, 2020, “The Scientific Justification for a U.S. Domestic High-Performance Reactor-Based Research Facility,” Report of the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, U.S. Department of Energy/Office of Science/July 2020, https://science.osti.gov/-/media/bes/besac/pdf/Reports/US_Domestic_HighPerformance_Reactor-Based_Research_Facility.pdf?la=en&hash=291CD65F6F02D66C9C7987CB6E660831BB0E1A0B.
3 American Physical Society, “Neutrons for the Nation: Discovery and Applications While Minimizing the Risk of Nuclear Proliferation,” July 2019, https://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/upload/APSNeutronsfortheNation.pdf.
researchers. Research participants were from 19 NIST divisions and offices, 36 U.S. government laboratories, 44 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, 49 U.S. corporations, and 169 U.S. universities.4 NCNR and its users conduct world-class, highly cited research in soft matter and biology, hard matter, chemical and engineering physics, and fundamental neutron physics studies. Despite instrument staffing levels much below international norms,5 major instruments have been brought on line: the Chromatic Analysis Neutron Diffractometer or Reflector (CANDoR) provides transformative new capabilities in time-resolved and polarized reflectometry; Very Small Angle Neutron Scattering (vSANS), a unique instrument worldwide, has been commissioned; major progress has been made on Neutron Interference Microscopy/Far Field Neutron Imaging; and plans and funding have been acquired to upgrade the Neutron Spin-Echo Spectrometer (NSE), a significant step up in performance that will make the capability internationally competitive. Tour de force groundbreaking experiments have demonstrated the significant advance of reactor sources for time-resolved elastic and inelastic neutron scattering with atomic resolution on millisecond time scales to measure response to perturbations of materials using timestamped data and a complex sample environment on the Multi-Axis Crystal Spectrometer (MACS). The project to add a new deuterium cold neutron source is on track, as well as the designs for upgrading the beamlines Neutron Guides (NG) 5, 6, and 7 with supermirrors that will be put in place during the planned shutdown in calendar year 2023 to install the new cold source.
The long-standing collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Center for High Resolution Neutron Scattering (CHRNS), which provides investment in beamline and special-environment staff that is essential for external user support and outreach, was continued for another 5 years in 2020. NCNR has developed and maintained effective partnerships with several universities and industry, including an industrial consortium on soft matter named nSoft, and successfully won funding for the development of several new instruments and upgrades. Neutron scattering worldwide is currently losing instrument capacity with the closure of sources in both North America (Chalk River, LANSCE) and Europe (HZB BER II, LLB Saclay). Continued investment in neutron instrumentation at NCNR is a vital part of the worldwide neutron scattering landscape.
However, flat budgets for NCNR for several years have caused a reduction of scientific staff by 18 since 2018, reducing capabilities essential for a world-class user facility and reducing NCNR’s ability to develop and continuously upgrade cutting-edge instruments, necessary for an old reactor to increase scientific productivity. NCNR has below 5 staff per instrument compared to 7 for the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL). Improvements in efficiency and technology developments have reached their limits of maximizing the efforts of the current staff over the past 7 years of flat budgets. If this continues, it is likely to even more greatly impact staff morale and the scientific productivity of the facility.
NCNR has a robust education and outreach program at all levels, from local middle-school teachers to postdoctoral fellows, run through CHRNS. The flagship neutron scattering summer school was run as a virtual program in 2020.
Until 2020, NCNR has had an excellent safety and reliability record and has delivered a 4-year average of 220 days of operation per year. The NCNR reactor is among the oldest operating large research reactors in the world, at more than 50 years of age. The current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license will expire in 2029, and a new operating license application will be required. There are plans to change the nuclear fuel from high enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) during that same year. Owing to the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, NCNR suspended operations of the reactor from March 17, 2020, and restarted it on July 15, 2020, with reduced staffing, internal use only of the instruments, and some support for mail-in external user operations. The reactor and beamline instruments ran in this way for three run cycles, with an intention to begin another cycle in February 2021. On February 3, 2021, the reactor experienced an automatic unplanned shutdown owing to fission products detected in the confinement building upon normal startup. The reactor remains shut down
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4 NIST Center for Neutron Research, 2020 Accomplishments and Opportunities, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.1257.pdf, accessed October 22, 2021.
5 BESAC, 2020.
while NCNR determines the cause of the incident, implements corrective and preventative actions, and requests a restart from the NRC.
The scientific case for restarting and replacing the reactor is clearly very strong. The economic benefits to the United States from the improved technologies that result from these scientific advances are also very large and will be quantified in a study that NIST commissioned in 2021. In order to support the U.S. user community and NIST’s internal needs, it is imperative to restart the NCNR reactor as quickly and safely as possible, plan ahead for continued enhancement of the beamline instruments, and build new instruments, and even more important, building on a recommendation of the 2018 NCNR Review,6 is for NCNR to provide an updated science case, and design and request the funding for a new reactor optimized for the needs 50 years into the future of NIST and the U.S. scientific community and U.S. industry. Of relevance to NIST’s mission of enhancing the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing, neutrons play a distinct role in the measurement of materials properties. They are uncharged and have deep penetration of solids relevant to bulk measurements needed for industry—for example, they are used to measure the porosity of rock for mining; they measure nondestructively the chemical profile, bulk modulus, and embrittlement of industrial-relevant materials such as cement and steel; and their unique atomic interactions with isotopes are used to map out light elements, including hydrogen placement in soft materials such as polymers and biological systems and drugs, lithium ion batteries, fluid flow in fuel cells, and internal combustion engines. In addition, because neutrons have a spin, polarized neutron scattering are uniquely used to study the complex magnetic structure and dynamics of materials at atomic scale—directly relevant to new materials used in spintronics and quantum sensors and computation devices relevant to competitiveness and national security.
Neutron activation analysis is used at NIST in a suite of chemical analysis methods to determine the elemental composition of materials in support of standards and reference materials. Neutron activation analysis can measure the hydrogen content of materials and is often required to certify Standard Reference Materials (SRMs), especially if they are difficult to dissolve. Since 2000, it has contributed to the certification of more than 120 SRMs.7 According to the Director of NCNR, in the calendar years 2019–2020, the 12 SRMs analyzed by neutron methods represents approximately 70 percent of the SRM unit sales for the 35 SRMs that included elemental analysis.
NCNR has developed new nondestructive in situ measurement capabilities and analysis methods for materials of importance to industry such as depth profiling, and to society in general such as nondestructive measurement techniques for stress measurements and corrosion of cement structures such as bridges. NCNR has provided measurement capabilities and services to industry, national defense, and homeland security needs, including supporting the nSoft consortium of industrial partners using small-angle neutron scattering to measure biological and polymeric materials of interest to the medical devices and pharmaceutical industry. Multiple case studies of successful innovations for industry from NCNR are listed on NIST’s web pages.8
KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The panel determined that the following issues merit the Center’s attention. More detail is provided in the final chapter of this report.
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6 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research: Fiscal Year 2018, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25282/an-assessment-of-the-center-for-neutron-research-at-thenational-institute-of-standards-and-technology.
7 BESAC, 2020.
8 See https://www.nist.gov/industry-impacts, accessed January 24, 2022.
Key Finding: The NCNR reactor (known as the National Bureau of Standards Reactor, or NBSR) is among the oldest operating large research reactors in the world, at more than 50 years of age. The current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license will expire in 2029, and a new operating license application will be required. There are plans to change the nuclear fuel from high enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU). When operating an aging nuclear reactor, there are known issues that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, there are also unknown aging issues that can arise and can be very difficult to address. The design, construction, and licensing of a new research reactor will be lengthy and costly, on the order of 10 years and a billion dollars.
Key Finding: The National Bureau of Standards Test Reactor (NBSR) staff has given some consideration to a new reactor concept and a study has been commissioned on the economic impacts of reactor-based neutron scattering. The planning process for a new reactor has begun but is moving slowly without new funding for a science case and for design of a new reactor tailored for cold neutron instruments and using LEU fuel. A long shutdown of NCNR would have a major impact on both the U.S. fundamental research effort as well as U.S. industrial competitiveness.
Key Conclusion: Additional input is warranted from the research community to understand its needs, more detailed design concepts, and a more robust cost estimate for the new reactor. It is important to have a design that is optimized for LEU fuel and that allows for future modifications because the new reactor should operate for 50 years. The opportunity here is to rethink the needs for science with neutrons 50 years out for both industry and the U.S. scientific community and to provide that case to Congress in order to obtain the funding for a new reactor able to meet those needs.
KEY RECOMMENDATION: The Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) should take a leadership role and own this mission with full support of NIST. The Director of NCNR should commission a study to define what the research community needs for the next 50 years in addition to the economic study already commissioned. In parallel and starting as soon as possible, the Director of NIST and the Director of NCNR should be proactive with the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology, the User Group Executive Committee, the local community, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the appropriate congressional committees to ensure support and to build the case for constructing a new research reactor.
Key Finding: The long-term impact of 7 years of flat budgets has caused a reduction of NCNR instrument staff by 20 percent to a level considerably below that of international standards.
Key Conclusion: Excellent in-house staff attracts and enables effective partnerships with excellent external groups and is essential to world-class scientific output. It is critical to continue to maintain a pipeline of such staff (e.g., through Ph.D. and postdoctoral programs) with a broad portfolio of instrumentation capacity and capability.
Key Conclusion: The reduction of instrument staff, already low by international standards, is reducing capabilities essential for a world-class user facility and reducing NCNR’s ability to develop and continuously upgrade cutting-edge instruments, necessary for a very old reactor to increase scientific productivity. Improvements in efficiency and technology developments have reached their limits of maximizing the efforts of the current staff over the past 7 years of flat budgets. If this continues, it is likely to even more greatly impact staff morale and the scientific productivity of the facility. More staff is needed in hardware and especially software to realize the potential of time-resolved studies.
Key Finding: Upgrades or planned upgrades to several instruments will bring them to par or nearly to par with global counterparts. These are the Neutron Spin Echo Spectrometer (NSE) upgrade and the Polarized Large Angle Resolution Spectrometer (PoLAR) secondary continuous-angle multiple energy analysis spectrometer for the Spin Polarized Inelastic Neutron Spectrometer (SPINS) replacement.
Key Conclusion: The upgrades and continual enhancements to instruments is owing to the outstanding quality of NCNR staff, with time to perform its own research and to collaborate on science with external users. It is essential for continued success at NCNR that the instrument staff can continue to perform its own research, thus attracting and retaining the best staff and users, and that this program of upgrades and enhancements is supported as a core part of facility operations to meet its mission to the user community.
KEY RECOMMENDATION: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) leadership should work with NIST leadership to ensure the support of NCNR at the level of staffing it needs to continue to develop upgrades and enhancements to instruments to ensure a world-class user facility.
