U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), Scholarship and Fellowship Education Grant, Faculty Development Grant, and Trade School and Community College Scholarship Grant, Fiscal Year (FY) 2020

The NRC is interested in institutions and technologies that will enhance the NRC’s transition as a 

modern, risk-informed regulator. The challenge areas below are of interest to the NRC and are 

provided for your awareness/consideration.

• Advanced non-light water reactors (e.g., material degradation, safety systems, non- traditional 

fuel concepts, safety systems)

o Heat transfer and fluid flow in molten salts and liquid metal coolants

o Physical properties and chemistry of molten salts, including tritium production

o Compatibility of reactors components with salt

o Corrosion tolerance and criterial for reactor components in salt, sodium, or high- temperature 

gas environments

o Graphite aging and degradation

o Modeling and simulation of steady-state and transient behavior of microreactors

o Operational and siting health physics and radiation protection dose calculations and modeling 

associated with advanced non-LWR

• Probabilistic Risk Assessment (e.g., human reliability analysis, organizational factors, natural 

hazards risk, common cause failures, crediting recovery of failed equipment, implementing 

alternative strategies to restore safety function, and approaches or methods to support the use of 

success paths in risk-informed decision-making)

•   Fire Risk Analysis

• Innovative radiation detection technologies for minimizing groundwater contamination at nuclear 

power plants.

•  Nuclear-safety related text mining analytics, and block chain technologies

• Fuels and Neutronics (e.g., nuclear data, lattice/core physics, transport, shielding criticality 

safety, and sensitivity uncertainty methods and analysis)

o Accident tolerant, high-burnup, and high-enrichment fuel modeling and performance

o Accelerated fuel qualification

o Modeling and simulation of metallic and Tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel

• Thermal-hydraulics (e.g., two-phase flow and heat transfer, post-critical heat flux phenomena, 

fluid mechanics, experimental programs, multi-physics methods, or computation)

o The development and benchmarking of multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in 

reactor fuel bundle geometries to facilitate modeling of reactor accident scenarios using 3D CFD 

methods.

o Sub-channel thermal-hydraulics.

o Quantification of code uncertainty and uncertainty methods.

• Consequence and Emergency Preparedness (e.g., radionuclide dispersion and migration, long-term 

post-accident recovery health and economic impacts)

o Benchmarking of simplified methods for near-field atmospheric dispersion affected by building 

wakes against state-of-the-art dispersion modeling methods

o Methods for estimating costs and durations for post-accident cleanup and recovery following 

severe accidents

• Materials engineering (e.g., metallurgy, corrosion science, fracture mechanics, advanced 

manufacturing, modeling, non-destructive examination)

• Applications of artificial intelligence and advanced sensors for in-service inspection of reactor 

components

•   Natural hazards assessment (seismic, flooding, and high-wind hazards)

o Flooding (e.g., probabilistic flood hazard assessment)

• Digital instrumentation and controls (e.g., systems design, software engineering, hazards 

analysis)

•   Cybersecurity

•   Characterization, handling, storage, or disposal of waste streams (including used fuel) from 

nuclear power plants (including the various advanced reactor designs that are currently under 

development.

Education

• Private institutions of higher education
• Public and state institutions of higher education

Miscellaneous

• Other