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Adequacy of Facilities, Equipment, and Human Resources

THE CENTER FOR NEUTRON RESEARCH

This review comes at an unprecedented time for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). First, 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. There were no health or safety impacts on personnel, the public, or the environment; however, the reactor remains shut down as NCNR determines the root cause of the incident, implements corrective and preventative actions, and requests a restart from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).¹ This comes 2 years before the planned 11-month reactor shutdown set to begin in calendar year 2023 to upgrade the cold neutron source from hydrogen to deuterium before switching from high enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel currently scheduled to occur in late 2029.

The unplanned shutdown has greatly affected the U.S. neutron scattering community. Before the shutdown, all neutron beamlines in the United States were oversubscribed: there were roughly three times as many proposals as there was beamtime at NCNR and the other two major U.S. neutron user facilities run by the Department of Energy (DOE) located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the High-Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). The impact of NCNR’s shutdown on the U.S. scientific neutron scattering community can be estimated by the number of scientific papers produced by NCNR users in 2019 (just over 300) compared to those produced at HFIR and SNS together (650). Also, during that year before COVID-19, NCNR worked with more than 50 U.S. industrial users. Given that there is already an inadequacy in beamtime provided by the combination of user facilities, approximately one-third of the users’ beamtime will be lost until NCNR can be restarted, significantly impacting the neutron scattering community and the materials research of U.S. industry. If one counts the number of beamlines in Europe and Asia in both the older and the newer neutron facilities that are currently or soon to be commissioned, the three current U.S. facilities before the shutdown lagged Europe by a factor of 3 and Asia by a factor of 2.² The NCNR shutdown has removed roughly one-third of the

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¹ NIST submitted an analysis to the NRC on October 1, 2021, that identified five root causes, including inadequate operator training and 10 contributing factors, such as a loss of experienced operators. In enclosures to the cover letter to the NRC, NIST identified 13 corrective actions that it would take before restart to prevent a recurrence and 15 measures after restart. See https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2127/ML21274A018.html.

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.

existing U.S. beamlines and the majority of the U.S. cold neutron instruments, including exquisite sample environment facilities and operations.

The health of NIST is crucial for U.S. competitiveness for our commercial and military needs and for fundamental metrology research applications and standards. U.S. innovation particularly depends on fundamental research, and NIST cannot retain its world prominence without it. A world-class leading neutron experimental facility operated by NIST in the future will ensure that the United States maintains competitiveness across the globe in neutron research and that industry is supported. 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. The other U.S. neutron sources and European and Asian sources cannot make up the capacity loss or provide the domestic industrial impact of NCNR.

In order to support the U.S. user community and NIST’s internal needs, it is imperative to safely restart the NCNR reactor as quickly as possible, plan ahead for enhancement of the beamline instruments, and build new instruments, and even more important, as was recommended by the 2018 NCNR Review,³ to provide an updated science case, design, and find the funding for a new reactor optimized for the needs of NIST, U.S. industry, and the U.S. science community in the next several decades.

Historical Overview

Because of the usefulness of neutrons in materials characterization, NIST, formerly the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), was one of the first U.S. agencies to obtain a reactor neutron source for in-house measurements to better provide for its mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve the quality of life. The NBS reactor was commissioned in 1969, one of three large reactors in the United States commissioned in that decade, and NCNR has since then played a vital role in NBS and then NIST internal research, calibration and metrology, and standards development as well as providing an outsized role in advancing neutron scattering in the United States as a user facility for the external scientific academic, national laboratories, and industrial communities.⁴

Neutrons play a distinct role in the measurement of materials properties. They are uncharged and interact with atomic nuclei and thus have deep penetration of solids relevant to bulk measurements needed for industry—for example, they can be used to measure the porosity of rock for mining; they can 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 can be used to map out light elements, including hydrogen placement in soft materials such as polymers and biological systems, lithium ion batteries, fluid flow in fuel cells, and internal combustion engines. In addition, because neutrons have a spin, polarized neutron scattering can be 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.

NIST’s internal use of the reactor for mission-related activities has been extensive. The Chemical Sciences Division of the Materials Measurement Laboratory (MML) uses neutron activation analysis 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.⁵

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³ 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.

⁴ BESAC, 2020.

⁵ BESAC, 2020.

According to the Director of NCNR, in the calendar years 2019–2020, the 12 SRMs analyzed by neutron methods represent approximately 70 percent of the SRM unit sales for the 35 SRMs that included elemental analysis. MML and NCNR also support the nSoft consortium of industrial partners using small-angle neutron scattering to measure biological and polymeric materials of interest to the industrial members.

They also have 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 corrosion of cement structures such as bridges. The Physical Measurements Laboratory has used its special beamlines at NCNR to perform high-resolution measurements of the properties of neutrons and basic parameters and symmetries of the weak nuclear interaction for fundamental physics, and to provide measurement capabilities and services to industry, national defense, and homeland security needs.

NCNR also has served the needs of the U.S. scientific community in a general user program based on peer-reviewed proposals, in partnerships with government, industry, and academic institutions, and allows proprietary research with full cost recovery. NCNR technical staff members perform their own research as well as develop new instruments, sample environments and data management capabilities, and collaborate with and assist external users who have been awarded beam time on a particular instrument. This has led to high scientific productivity and excellent staff retention and morale. A long partnership with NSF has been instrumental in developing new beamline and sample environment capabilities, especially utilizing cold neutrons. This partnership has also provided education and state-of-the-art neutron scattering techniques along with five beamlines and instruments for outside users. Now one of three major neutron scattering sources in the United States, NCNR has awarded more than 200 in each call for proposals, with about 2 calls each year, and served roughly 2,800 external and 200 internal NIST users.⁶ From 2016 to 2019, pre-COVID-19, NCNR has had an excellent safety and reliability record of 98 percent and has delivered an average of 220 days of operation per year. NCNR has a worldwide reputation as an excellent and creative user facility that is cost effective, with high scientific productivity despite fewer technical staff per instrument⁷ and an aging reactor, and has attracted excellent outside users who produce world-leading results.^8,9

Accomplishments Since 2018 Review

NCNR provided 212 days of beamtime with 98 percent reliability in 2019, served the internal needs of 19 NIST divisions and offices, and served 3,068 researchers and 50 companies.¹⁰ The onset of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic caused NCNR to suspend operations of the reactor from March 17, 2020, through July 15, 2020, and to operate with reduced staffing, internal use only of the instruments, and some support for mail-in external user operations after July 15. The reactor and beamlines ran in this way for three run cycles, with an intention to begin another cycle in February 2021. NCNR staff reached out to its industrial collaborators and principal investigators of all accepted proposals and assisted them in remote operations with beamline scientists running the experiments. This worked reasonably well for the hard matter experiments, but less well for the soft matter experimentalists, who needed to make their

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⁶ See https://www.nist.gov/ncnr/proposal-statistics.

⁷ “Neutron Users in Europe: Facility-Based Insights and Scientific Trends,” https://europeanspallationsource.se/sites/default/files/files/document/2018-06/NEUTRON%20USERS%20IN%20EUROPE%20-%20Facility-Based%20Insights%20and%20Scientific%20Trends.pdf, accessed October 15, 2021.

⁸ BESAC, 2020.

⁹ 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/popareports/upload/APSNeutronsfortheNation.pdf.

¹⁰ NIST Center for Neutron Research, 2020 Accomplishments and Opportunities, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.1257.pdf, accessed October 22, 2021.

samples onsite. Because the beamline operations software is behind a NIST firewall, remote users cannot access it to run remotely without on-site beamline staff, and according to NCNR management there is insufficient technical support staff to handle all the external users remotely. Nevertheless, this was a remarkable achievement to maintain beamline operations, continue to bring new instruments on board, and produce science under stressful conditions, for which the management and staff of NCNR must be commended.

On February 3, 2021, the reactor experienced an automatic unplanned shutdown owing to fission products detected in the confinement building upon normal startup. There were no health or safety impacts on personnel, the public, or the environment; however, the reactor remains shut down while NCNR determines the root cause of the incident, implements corrective and preventative actions, and requests a restart from the NRC. This comes just before the planned 11-month reactor shutdown set to begin in calendar year 2023 to increase the cold neutron flux by adding a new deuterium cold source before a scheduled shift from HEU to LEU fuel in late 2029. Since the shutdown, the NCNR beamline staff has assisted many users with currently allocated NCNR beamtime by locating beamtime on the other two major U.S. facilities, on European and Asian facilities where possible, and on smaller facilities run by universities. The scientific staff have pivoted to working on upgrade plans using where possible other neutron facilities for calibration and upgrades to beamlines, instruments, analysis of neutron scattering data in the context of other complementary techniques, molecular dynamics simulations to extract the most information possible on scientifically important topics, and use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), automation, and writing papers. The reactor engineering staff has focused work on the root cause analysis of the February 3 incident and the reactor cold neutron source project.

The Center for High Resolution Neutron Scattering (CHRNS), a long-time and very successful partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), was renewed in 2020 for another 5 years, and strong partnerships with NSF, the University of Maryland, and the University of Delaware are developing user instruments and sample environments that are world class. Major instruments have been brought on line: the Chromatic Analysis Neutron Diffractometer or Reflector (CANDoR) provides transformative new capabilities in time-resolved and polarized scattering; 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), providing a significant step up in performance that makes the capability internationally competitive. The project to add a new deuterium cold neutron source is on track, as well as the designs for upgrading the beamlines NG-5, NG-6, and NG-7 with supermirrors that will be put in place during the planned shutdown in calendar year 2023 to install the new cold source.

NCNR has a vibrant research program with above-average impact in terms of very highly cited papers. In a citation study by the Canadian group Science-Metrix, NCNR appears as the leading neutron facility in terms of average of relative citations.¹¹ In this metric, the world average number of citations is 1.0, and 1.2 would be 20 percent more citations than the average. NCNR scores nearly 2 (1.95) on this scale, with other world neutron facilities in the range 1.03 to 1.57 (for the period 2000–2017). The report also points out that “NCNR is … the only institution examined to have displayed consistently high performances across most indicators.”

NCNR continues to have a world-leading program in soft matter and biology research: especially notable work since 2018 was on self-assembled systems and membrane dynamics. A new focus on time-resolved measurements at millisecond time scales is in a sweet spot for soft condensed matter dynamics. The chemical, plastics, and consumer-goods industries require neutrons to determine the structure and function of liquids, gels, foams, emulsions, and solid materials, as demonstrated by the very active members of the nSoft consortium. More than 60 percent of all FDA-approved small molecule drugs target membrane proteins; however, their structural characterization is particularly challenging with standard

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¹¹ “Science-Metrix Bibliometric Study on CNBCs Scientific Publications 1980–2017,” https://www.science-metrix.com/bibliometric-study-on-cnbcs-scientific-publications-1980-2017/, accessed January 13, 2022.

techniques such as X-ray diffraction. Further development of neutron reflectometry methods on supported membranes, along with the integration of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, is likely to aid in the development of small molecule drugs to inhibit this challenging class of drug targets, which is of direct relevance to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. NCNR’s scientific impact in hard condensed matter continues to be world class, with a steady flow of important work on topological spin excitations and unconventional superconductivity interacting with magnetism, of relevance to the development of future microelectronics and quantum devices for computing and cryptography. 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 time-stamped data and a complex sample environment on the Multi-Axis Crystal Spectrometer (MACS). Time-resolved measurements at these scales are critical to understand the dynamics of magnetic materials potentially useful for quantum devices especially suited to neutrons because of their unique interaction properties and spin. The neutron interferometry facility^12,13 is one of four in the world and one of the best two. The neutron interferometry group is able to perform high-precision measurements thanks to very long, best in the world, stability of their instruments. A notable accomplishment was the introduction of the orbital angular momentum to create neutrino spin-orbit lattices in analog to optical lattices created by circularly polarized light.¹⁴ The group has also developed a novel measurement of the neutron charge radius. The alpha-gamma neutron metrology activity is a unique NIST capability that can measure the absolute activity of an alpha source and determines neutron fluence with a world-best precision of 0.06 percent.

The most heavily cited work in chemical physics research focused on energy technologies. Notable achievements have been the characterization of tailored nanoparticles for photocatalysis in hydrogen generation and the detailed understanding of sorbent-sorbate interactions in metal organic frameworks for separations, of direct relevance to the chemical and energy industry. NCNR has also demonstrated direct industrial impact through the development and utilization of a mail-in sample program and an autonomous formulation laboratory with remote Small-Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) and Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS) for the nSoft consortium, maintaining the ability to provide timely results for commercial impact during the pandemic and in the future without requiring industrial scientist presence on site. Other impacts have been the nondestructive measurements of Li distribution in batteries during operation, and by using simultaneous X-ray and neutron tomography to observe flows in fuel cells for General Motors and the Department of Energy (DOE) and to provide understanding of residual stress and strain caused by rapid melting and fast cooling encountered in additive manufacturing. In addition, NCNR maintained six active agreements with biotech and pharmaceutical companies. In support of U.S. industry, NCNR was a key contributor to a number of technological breakthroughs in this period, including gels for oral drug delivery, use of shear-thickening fluids in impact resistant applications, additives to jet fuel, and ion exchange membranes.

Challenges and Opportunities

Two unprecedented occurrences in 2020 and 2021 caused unplanned shutdowns of the reactor operations and radical changes to beamline operations.

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¹² K. Weigandt, et al., NIST, 2021, “Neutron Interferometric Microscopy Small Forces and Hierarchical Structures,” presentation to the Panel on Assessment of the Center for Neutron Research, July 21.

¹³ J. Nico, NIST, 2021, “Recent Neutron Physics Group Activities at the NCNR,” presentation to the Panel on Assessment of the Center for Neutron Research by S. Dewey and D. Hussey, July 21.

¹⁴ D. Saranac, et al., “Generation and Detection of Spin-Orbit Couple Neutron Beams,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 8, 2019, www.pnas.org/content/116/41/20328, accessed January 20, 2022.

• First, the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic caused a shutdown of reactor operations from March until July 2020, when there was a restart of internal use only and mail-in operations. Given the resurgence of variants of concern, low vaccination rates combined with the possibility of spread of the disease by the vaccinated, it is likely that running of NCNR will need to settle on a new normal in the future, including the ability for outside users to run instruments remotely. This is especially of importance to industry.¹⁵ The current operations software is behind the NIST firewall, and for remote operations it either needs to allow external users access and/or requires the hiring of more beamline scientists/operators to manage sample changes and run experiments for the external users in combination with more automation. The support of external users and especially of industry, a key NIST mission, may require more NCNR beamline scientists and technician staffing in the future. NCNR instrument staff numbers are already low by international standards. Fully automated and remote routine operations on some instruments could provide the opportunity to serve many more users, including those from universities and especially from companies who are not familiar with the power of neutron techniques.
• Second, the February 3, 2021, unplanned shutdown provides a critical juncture for NCNR. The path to restart will likely be arduous, could involve NRC hearings, and could drive a difficult to manage community response and a hit to NCNR’s reputation; the cost for corrective actions and the target start date are currently unknown. There has already been an impact on partnerships, as NSF has withdrawn half of its funding of CHRNS for 1 year, and there may be more impact on other partnerships, including with industry, and staff morale the longer the shutdown continues. The NIST Director has provided funds to make up the loss of NSF funds for a year and those needed for the reactor recovery so far. If the allowed restart date runs into the planned shutdown date for the installation of the new cold source, there may be an impact on schedule and operations for the cold source and beamline upgrade as well as the partnership with NSF. There is an immediate large impact on the U.S. neutron scattering community, particularly for those requiring cold neutrons and for internal NIST users working on materials standards and physics experiments. Given the already heavily oversubscribed neutron beamline situation in the United States, the user community could be forced to move their experiments to Europe and Asia. Should this happen, there would be a major impact on U.S. industry materials research and development (R&D) and on standard reference materials requiring neutron activation. The opportunity here is to rethink the needs of both industry and the U.S. scientific community for new metrology and industrial uses and new science with neutrons 50 years out and to provide that “science case” to Congress in order to obtain the funding for a new reactor to be able to meet those needs. Many of these future compelling directions are clear from the work of NCNR mentioned in this report. However, as for any request to Congress for funding of a new large scientific facility, the science case is normally provided by a major commissioned study of experts and potential industrial users in the community both inside and outside NIST and should also make the case for the credentials and expertise of NCNR for operating such a facility and why it should be located in the United States as opposed to a partnership with another country. The design of the new reactor, its operator, and its location should then follow the requirements provided by the science case study and the estimated cost, schedule, community and regulatory environment. Because such a study may take up to 2 years to accomplish, it must be started as soon as possible, within the next year or so. This science case would add to the case of the economic study commissioned in 2021 by the NCNR Director. To minimize impact to the user community, it would be preferable to restart the reactor before the scheduled 2023 upgrade, but very difficult to plan under the circumstances. In addition, the scheduled downtime for the cold

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¹⁵ While this cannot be supported definitively, it reflects the growing opinion of those involved with this type of research infrastructure, including in Europe. In addition to potential restrictions on travel, accessibility questions that can be addressed only by remote access and also the question of environmental impact of travel have been raised.

• source upgrade should not coincide with the planned HFIR HEU-LEU conversion and reactor vessel upgrade.

Longer term concerns raised in the 2018 review and even earlier reviews have become more critical for the NCNR going forward.

• NCNR has a total annual budget of $60 million (about $48 million appropriated by the U.S. Congress and the rest from other sources). The budget has been essentially flat for the past 7 years. The long-term impact of flat budgets has caused a reduction of scientific staff by nearly 20 percent because NCNR management reduced scientific staff to maintain staff required for reactor operation and safety. Despite the flat funding, NCNR has been remarkably productive, for which management and staff are to be commended. Current staffing is low by international standards: for example, fewer than 5 staff members per instrument, compared to 7 at ILL.¹⁶ Improvements in efficiency and technology developments have reached their limits of maximizing the efforts of the current staff. This is already 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, not to mention staffing up for more remote operations (see discussion above). This may cause a greater impact on staff morale and the scientific productivity of the facility.
• The need for relicensing of the reactor in 2029 and the current plan for HEU to LEU conversion in the same year will challenge NCNR (extensive work required for relicensing, and increased but unknown cost of yet to be developed fuel) and increase the downtime for the U.S. scientific user community.
• Europe and Asia have newer, better staffed, and more powerful neutron facilities and a compelling future vision compared to those of the United States.^17,18 This may cause leading-edge scientists to move to work and do their research at the best facilities, not in the United States, and thus cause a large impact on U.S. competitiveness in science and in industrial materials R&D.
• 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.

New challenges have also emerged since the 2018 review.

• Maintaining open access to researchers has become more difficult with increasing security demands of scientific user facilities from the U.S. government.
• Massive amounts of data and metadata are being generated from new and upgraded instruments and from the combination of simultaneous characterization techniques on the same sample, overwhelming current data management systems.
• There is increasing demand for time-stamped data, metadata, and data storage utilizing the principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of Digital Assets (FAIR).¹⁹

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¹⁶ “Neutron Users in Europe: Facility-Based Insights and Scientific Trends,” https://europeanspallationsource.se/sites/default/files/files/document/2018-06/NEUTRON%20USERS%20IN%20EUROPE%20-%20Facility-Based%20Insights%20and%20Scientific%20Trends.pdf, accessed October 15, 2021.

¹⁷ BESAC, 2020.

¹⁸ “Neutron Users in Europe: Facility-Based Insights and Scientific Trends,” https://europeanspallationsource.se/sites/default/files/files/document/2018-06/NEUTRON%20USERS%20IN%20EUROPE%20-%20Facility-Based%20Insights%20and%20Scientific%20Trends.pdf, accessed October 15, 2021.

¹⁹ See https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles, accessed October 15, 2021.

• There is an opportunity for NIST and NCNR to lead the way in defining the standards for open data, data markup, and data management utilizing FAIR principles at large data rates.

THE REACTOR

The NIST reactor, or formally the National Bureau of Standards Test Reactor (NBSR), is among the oldest operating large research reactors in the world, at more than 50 years of age.²⁰ In addition, the current U.S. National 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. NCNR has an Aging Reactor Management program to meet maintenance and regulatory requirements and to monitor long-term materials aging and radiation damage issues to ensure safe operations.²¹ 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. When building a nuclear reactor, there is often an underestimation of the time and cost to prepare the engineering drawings needed to construct the nuclear reactor and the associated building. In addition, there are often insufficient technical details in the initial U.S. NRC license application to enable the U.S. NRC staff to evaluate the safety analysis that is required. The NBSR staff have given some consideration for a new reactor concept, but additional input is warranted from the research community to understand their needs, develop more detailed design concepts, and develop a more robust cost estimate. 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 into the future. It is likely that it will take more than 10 years and close to a billion dollars to design and build a new research reactor at NIST. This includes developing a preliminary design, establishing a more detailed design for application for a construction permit from the NRC, developing the construction plans, construction of the new reactor and, finally, obtaining an operating license from the NRC. In consideration of the NCNR staff’s limited resources, the new optimized reactor design may be more important than the swap-in upgrade of LEU fuel in the aging reactor.

The importance of a safe, reliable nuclear reactor to support NIST’s R&D program cannot be underestimated. Without a reliable supply of neutrons, NIST cannot fulfill its unique basic and applied research programs.

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²⁰ The reactor first went critical in 1967 while under a provisional facility operating license and began full power operation in 1969. On May 21, 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission issued Facility Operating License TR-5. A 1984 license renewal authorized the NBSR to operate at an increased power level of 20 megawatts.

²¹ R. Dimeo, NIST, 2021, “NCNR Lab Plan,” presentation to the Panel on Assessment of the Center for Neutron Research, July 21.