For the fourth consecutive year, funding provided through Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by the NNSA Next Generation Safeguards Initiative has allowed Georgia Tech students enrolled in the Nuclear Safeguards class to spend a week (over Spring Break) at ORNL taking the Nondestructive Assay (NDA) Applications for International Safeguards laboratory course. The students cover a variety of applications from uranium enrichment measurements to radioactive material holdup measurements.

This portion of the NRE 4803 course has been well received and allows the students hands-on experiences with materials and technologies not readily available to them on campus. The class is limited to 16 students. 

In nuclear facilities, some material may plate out in piping, ducts, etc. and  be unaccounted for in the exiting stream. The students are attempting to locate and quantify the radioactive material in the various simulated geometries.

NRE student, Angelo Spinetta, enjoyed his time at ORNL stating, "the Safeguards class was an amazing experience for me as a student of nuclear engineering. Besides learning about the policy side of the field at Georgia Tech, I had the opportunity to visit a state of the art national laboratory and I had the chance to see how inspectors of the IAEA perform their job. I recommend this course to all my classmates. This class was definitely a great experience."