4
Budget, Facilities, Instrumentation, and Human Resources

This chapter addresses the third item in the statement of task (see Chapter 1), assessing the adequacy of the budget, facilities, instrumentation, and human resources of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). That portion of the statement of task asked two specific questions: How well do the facilities, instrumentation, and human resources support the NCNR’s technical programs and its ability to achieve its stated objectives? and How could they be improved? This addresses this issue by examining, in turn, NCNR’s budget, facilities, instrumentation, and human resources, closing with a look at NCNR’s reactor management plan and upgrade. There are recommendations for improvements in these areas.

BUDGET

The NCNR baseline budget has remained flat for many years, prior to the reactor event in 2021. In fact, it had been declining when adjusted for annual inflation. The 2021 National Academies’ assessment report on NCNR identified the long-term impact of 7 years of flat budgets as causing a 20 percent reduction in the NCNR instrument staff, which resulted in a level considerably below staffing levels typically seen at major international neutron sources (NASEM 2021). This downward trend has gotten worse in the intervening 2 years since the past report. An increase in funds after the reactor event was allocated for the recovery effort, which was primarily directed toward improving reactor operations. High operational performance is linked to a proportionate financial commitment to operations, so sustainment of this support will be critical. Another challenge will be maintaining the commitment to sustaining a high level of professionalism and expertise in reactor operations when budgetary pressures from the coming increase in scientific activities compete with flat budgetary resources. The risk to mission objectives will now come more from a lack of scientific support as budgetary risk may lead to a failure to meet mission and objectives if a corresponding budgetary commitment is not made in scientific staffing resources. Taken all together, this points to a need for increased funding.

Adjustments in appropriations for operations have not kept up with increases in overhead and personnel-related costs since 2018. For instance, the overall result is a shortfall of about $6 million per year in NCNR Neutron Condensed Matter Science and Research Facility Operation. Given that NCNR’s total baseline scientific and technical research services appropriations are in the range of approximately $50 million to $60 million, this is a significant decrease. This has resulted in the loss of about 11 permanent staff in the Science and Research Facility Operations groups since the 2018 assessment (NASEM 2018), as well as reductions in capital purchases, bringing on fewer postdocs, and shutting down instruments. This represents a challenging downward spiral that risks the industrial, economic, and commerce-driven mission of the institute.

FACILITIES AND INSTRUMENTATION

The Computational Science team is hampered by a lack of access to high-performance computing resources and has been using a home-built, ad hoc cluster of desktop computers with slow interconnections. There are various ongoing individual efforts across the scientific staff to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, enhanced data processing, and advanced data analysis methods. Many of these would benefit from access to high-performance computing resources to enable them to scale up to support the broader user program rather than individual projects. A lack of centralized resources, or of a centrally managed access to such resources, is already limiting the capability and capacity of the scientific computing program and this limitation will become worse in the coming years.

A project to develop a design for a new low enriched uranium (LEU) research reactor is in a preconceptual design stage, with a workshop for community input held in October 2023. This is discussed in more detail in the “Reactor Management Plan and Upgrade” section below.

As set forth in Chapter 2, NCNR hosts a suite of 30 neutron beam instruments, of which 17 are neutron-scattering instruments operated by NCNR; 11 are imaging, analytical chemistry, and neutron physics instruments operated by the NIST Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) and Material Measurement Laboratory (MML); one is a test station; and one is the nSoft small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) instrument operated collaboratively by MML and NCNR.

Since the inception of the facility, NCNR has maintained an ongoing program of instrument replacement, upgrades, and renewals in order to meet the needs of stakeholders across government, academia, and industry. This program is dependent not only on sufficient capital funding, but also on sufficient base funding for staffing. The current budget and staffing levels will not support continued operation of the full suite of NCNR instruments, and there is a significant risk that valuable and productive instruments will need to be mothballed. This will be a further blow to the neutron-scattering community in the United States and will hamper efforts to recover scientific productivity following the unplanned outage owing to the reactor event in 2021. As was highlighted in the presentations made to the panel, there is no redundancy built into the neutron-scattering instruments, particularly in the United States, where instruments are already oversubscribed when all facilities and systems are operational.

The ultra-high-resolution, small-angle neutron scattering (USANS) instrument, for example, is unstaffed at present. The SANS program is core to NCNR, and a loss of a third of the SANS beamtime will be devastating.

As explained in detail in previous chapters, the BT-1⁵ diffractometer is a workhorse instrument that has been exceptionally productive over its 30 years of operation. It has been key to the success of NCNR research in the area of inorganic materials for gas capture and storage. The proposed modernization of BT-1 is key to ensuring that this world-leading research program continues to advance. The strategic investment in this instrument is estimated to cost an additional $20 million to $30 million.

An upgrade to the cold source and associated guide system is progressing well and will provide across-the-board improvements to the cold neutron instrument suites, with particularly impressive gains for the Polarized Large Angle Resolution Spectrometer (PoLAR) instrument, which will benefit from a fully redesigned and dedicated guide system. PoLAR is a proposed project (approximately $15 million) to build a replacement for the aging cold triple-axis instrument. This new triple-axis spectrometer for NG5 would be a cold neutron instrument with a polarized beam capability. The cold source and guide installation will require an 11-month reactor outage, the timing of which will need to be coordinated with the plans for restart following the 2021 reactor event outage.

A project to improve the system known as the rabbit system would restore full functionality of the in-core irradiation system (approximately $2 million to $3 million). Eighty percent of NIST-produced standard reference materials are related to chemical composition. The in-core irradiation system supports neutron activation analysis of many of those materials. A fully functional system consists of two irradiation transfer stations. Currently, one of the two has been cannibalized to scavenge parts to support a single operational system. This situation poses a failure risk to NIST’s standard reference material work.

HUMAN RESOURCES

The 2021 National Academies’ assessment report on NCNR concluded that the number of instrument staff was already low compared with major international neutron sources (NASEM 2021). For example, at NCNR the instrument-staff-to-neutron-instrument ratio is 4–4.5:1. At the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the ratio is 5.5–6:1; at the Institut Laue Langevin it is about 7:1; and at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory it is 7–8:1. NCNR’s low instrument-staff-to-neutron-instrument ratio is reducing capabilities that are essential for a world-class user facility and reducing NCNR’s ability to develop and continuously upgrade cutting-edge instruments, something necessary for a very old reactor if one is to increase scientific productivity. Improvements in the efficiency of work and the implementation of better technology have both helped to mitigate this staff shortage in the short term, but they have accomplished about all that could be hoped, and the 2021 report identified a risk to staff morale and the scientific productivity of the facility resulting from this situation (NASEM 2021). This risk is starting to be realized. The impending ramp-up of scientific activities once neutrons are available is presenting a challenge to the scientific staff. Staffing levels have become worse through the loss of key personnel, particularly to support the SANS instruments.

The impact of the long unplanned shutdown on research output is not yet visible in the publication metrics. Rapidly increasing the overall productivity of NCNR will include an urgent reengagement of the user community. Concurrently, there is an urgent need to increase the number of staff, as the reactor restarts, and as the user program rapidly grows. Reassignment of scientific staff to fill the most critical vacancies, such as on the SANS instruments, may mitigate this to some extent. There will, however, be significant impacts to staff morale as scientists are moved away from their areas of expertise and interest. Reassignment will also create capability and capacity gaps elsewhere in the

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⁵ BT stands for beam tube. But the instruments are referred to as “BT” and that is the nomenclature used in this report.

instrument suite and is therefore at best a temporary fix. The current instrument staffing level does not allow for sustainable scientific operation with the current level of capability and capacity.

Having opportunities for career growth is a primary concern among reactor operations staff, who feel that holding an operator license limits career mobility when reactor staffing is low because the regulatory staffing requirements of the control room will take priority over individual professional development. NCNR’s challenges in offering competitive pay is also an obstacle. The addition of a fifth reactor operator shift will provide for adequate training and career growth among the operations and facility engineering staff. NCNR is working on setting up this fifth shift.

NCNR’s Safety Assessment Committee (SAC) report in 2022 reported a “monumental effort” by NCNR staff and a unity of purpose in restarting the NCNR reactor and said that NCNR staff are fully committed to the NCNR mission (NCNR 2022). An example of the staff’s dedication to the NCNR mission is how, despite the challenging circumstances, they have supported their researchers through aftercare to such a level that the user community stated that support has not dwindled despite the loss in scientific personnel. This is a remarkable and commendable effort on behalf of the remaining scientific personnel, but it reveals that the existing staff is now at greater risk of burnout, particularly with the anticipated increased workload once neutrons become available.

In its report, the SAC did note challenges. A major concern is the ability to retain NCNR staff. NCNR is not able to compete on the basis of pay. Staff have left for other, better-paying positions in the federal government. Also, candidates interested in employment at NCNR are reported to be withdrawing from consideration after learning what their salary would be and determining that it will not meet their needs. The SAC concluded that a special pay scale would seem to be appropriate to address these concerns (NCNR 2022). Personnel shortages will be challenging in restarting scientific activities at NCNR, fully staffing neutron instruments, and supporting any expansions in work at NCNR.

In 2023, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the report National Institute of Standards and Technology: Improved Workforce Planning Needed to Address Recruitment and Retention Challenges (GAO 2023). It found that NIST is competing for a specialized candidate pool without being able to offer the salary (up to three times higher than NCNR can offer) and other flexibilities that the private sector offers. Furthermore, NIST is suffering from a tighter recruiting environment because postdoc applications are down. Postdocs are an important recruiting pool for NCNR. The GAO report also talks about succession challenges. NIST’s workforce is very specialized, and there is a great deal of knowledge that can only be obtained once one is working there. When people leave, either for other positions or when they retire, it is very hard to replace these people in a timely manner, which creates knowledge and experience gaps. The GAO report concluded that there is a need for long-term planning and concomitant commitment to mitigate these challenges (GAO 2023). While that report addresses NIST as a whole, NCNR’s personnel challenges are similar to those of NIST overall.

Noteworthy Activities in Workforce Development and Educational Resources

In spite of the challenges discussed above, it was noted that a large number of students and postdocs who have worked at NCNR have been hired as assistant professors at many different universities or have gone to industry to take on leadership positions. It is also interesting that, at least for the postdocs with whom the panel interacted, there was an impressive number of female postdocs. The mentoring of young graduate students and postdocs by senior researchers appears to have been working well because, in spite of not having access to neutrons at NCNR, the students are very enthusiastic and excited about their work and prospects and have been supported by NCNR’s beamline staff to get beamtime at other facilities around the world. Nevertheless, there is a sense of concern that will only deepen further if the reactor does not restart at high power and neutron beam time resumes quickly.

That said, there is an urgent need to reengage with the neutron user community, which has suffered from lack of access to neutron beamtime during the NCNR outage (see, e.g., Kramer 2021). Since August 2023, the outage of the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been undergoing an outage to install accelerator and target components as part of its Proton Power Upgrade; this outage, which is projected to extend until July 2024, will further restrict access to neutron beamtime in the United States, compounding the effects of outages at NCNR. These factors all need to be carefully considered when deciding on the timing of the cold source outage at NCNR with the goal of restoring and maintaining neutron access for users in the United States.

Another noteworthy accomplishment in terms of workforce development is the SANS overview online course developed by NCNR for teaching University of Delaware students and remote students at 18 other universities that was held in spring 2023. The course will once again be taught in spring 2024, and there are plans to convert the material presented into a textbook, which will be an enormous contribution to helping educate a new cadre of future neutron scattering scientists.

REACTOR MANAGEMENT PLAN AND UPGRADE

The NCNR reactor is among the oldest operating large research reactors in the world, more than 50 years old. The current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license will expire in 2029, and a new operating license application will be required. The change in the nuclear fuel from highly enriched uranium (HEU) to LEU will not occur before 2030. The NCNR reactor had an excellent safety and reliability record until 2020, delivering a 4-year average of 220 days of operations per year. However, on February 3, 2021, the reactor experienced an automatic unplanned shutdown owing to fission products detected in the confinement building upon normal startup. The source of the problem was traced to an unlatched fuel element.

NCNR rapidly committed to a number of corrective actions, and NIST and the Department of Commerce provided NCNR Reactor Operations and Engineering short-term funding for reactor recovery activities and ongoing funding increases for corrective actions. The base budget was increased by $5.0 million per year in both 2022 and 2023 from the 2021 level of $14.2 million per year, and one-off allocations of recovery funds of $13.4 million and $11.7 million were made in 2022 and 2023 respectively. There was extensive reorganization and changes in practice for the Reactor Operations and Engineering team, together with new and more extensive training and the introduction of enhanced standards for qualification and proficiency.

A request to restart the reactor was submitted to the NRC on October 1, 2021. This request included the root causes of the reactor event and specified corrective actions. The NRC gave permission to restart the reactor on March 9, 2023, and initial criticality (50 kW) was achieved on March 16, 2023. Operations were started at 1 MW on June 1, 2023, in preparation for operator licensing.

The low-power operations have revealed the presence of fission products in reactor helium sweep gas and indicate that despite extensive clean-up work, there is still probably about 1 g of fissionable

material near the core. However, fission products seen in effluents are not near regulatory limits, and engineering fixes are being developed to address this.

As this is written, it is expected that the reactor power may be raised beyond 1 MW by late summer 2023, with extensive monitoring of effluent fluxes and tests conducted on the engineering fixes. However, there are insufficient licensed operators to run the reactor 24/7 for any extended period until the current class of additional operators completes licensing examinations. Once complete, the full complement of five four-person shift crews will support reliable 24/7 operations.

Although the NCNR reactor is more than 50 years old, systems incorporate fail-safe design and a proven hierarchy of interlocks and protective features, so the age does not increase the risk to human safety. However, the age does pose a risk to reliability, requiring the replacement of aging components periodically—often at considerable expense. The reactor design could be improved in conjunction with these planned replacements to deliver significantly higher neutron flux. These aging management issues are being appropriately handled through the programs implemented as corrective actions from the recent events. Preconceptual design work has been initiated to address these points. The creation of the reactor aging management division shows a commitment to improving and maintaining the core reactor support facilities.

The plan to convert the NCNR reactor to LEU involves high-density monolithic uranium-molybdenum fuel with 19.75 percent enrichment; the conversion is not expected to occur before 2030. This fuel is expected to have 10–15 percent lower neutron flux than the present HEU fuel and be more expensive. Moreover, the installation of a new cold source is delayed and will require a shutdown of 11 months. However, additional funding will be required for user operations post-conversion to LEU due, in part, to the fuel being more expensive.

Planning is under way for a new reactor. The 2021 NCNR assessment report recommended the following:

Section 10231 of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 stated as follows:

At the time of the assessment meeting, NCNR was nearing the completion of a preconceptual design report for a new reactor and an economic impact study. A scientific community workshop occurred in October 2023 to gather community input on the design. A final report from this workshop is expected in January 2024.

The main elements of the preconceptual design include simple, safe, and affordable reactor operations; providing significantly increased capacity for U.S. neutron research and significantly increased data rates compared to the current suite of instruments, both from improved instrument and optics design and placing cold sources in regions of higher neutron fluxes. The preconceptual design is for a reactor of nominal 20 MW power using LEU in a light-water-cooled compact reactor core. This will be surrounded by a reflector tank containing heavy water. Plans include 2 cold neutron sources, 8 thermal neutron beams, and a capacity for up to 50 instruments. Figure 4-1 shows the elements of the preconceptual design.

REFERENCES