The Growing Challenge Of Nuclear Materials Management

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) weapons complex national laboratories face a unique challenge- its workforce of the cold war era is quickly reaching retirement and they are finding themselves unable to compete against high-tech industry for fresh replacements. The U.S. is at a critical juncture as the defense complex moves from an era of reliance on nuclear weapons testing to one of prohibitions on nuclear tests. it is critical that relevant information from the testing era be transfered in an active mentoring relationship from actual participants before they are lost permanently. A solution to this challenge, as highlighted in this paper, is o initiate a focused effort to engage high-caliber university students in laboratory research at universities and to connect these students with the research scientists at the national laboratories. The proposed solution iuses the long-term applied research needs of the laboratories as a tool to entice university students to get deeply involved with the laboratories and as a filter to allow the national laboratories to evaluate the quality of the students and recruit the very best. the development and implementation of this program follows closely the recommendations made in the Commission on Maintaining United States Nuclear Weapons Expertise Report released march, 1 1999