Educate New Generation on Nuclear Technology through Collaborating Engineering Project

For the past several decades, nuclear technology has remained as one of the top interested issues due to its application as a new energy resource as well as a threaten weapon of massive destruction.In the United States, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) within the Department of Energy specifies its national security missions including increasing public awareness of nuclear security and reducing the threaten of global nuclear proliferation.Aligned with the above mentioned NNSA missions, Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) launched a collaboration project to conduct research on the sensor and detector applications to nuclear materials sponsored by the Department of Energy.PVAMU is the second oldest institution of higher education in the state of Texas and an HBCU (historically black colleges and universities).With the support from national research laboratories, this collaborative project brings together several departments within the College of Engineering at PVAMU, which include Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and the leading department Electrical and Computer Engineering.With a focus on developing a portable nuclear detection device, a solid state nuclear track detector (SSNTD) was studied and implemented with Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detector along with hand-held feature provided by National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW PDA Mobile Module to meet the demand.Different radiation sources were tested through data acquisition, analysis, and data presentation to prove the effectiveness of the system.At the same time, undergraduate student education is another important feature of this project.Student researchers, senior design projects, and summer workshops were engines to disseminate research findings to the next generation in order to produce qualified workforce to protect national security.The success of this project serves as an example to introduce recent academic achievements and industry products to the new generation through interdisciplinary research activities.The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack imposed upon the United States the fundamental importance to our safety of the reduction in the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.High on the list of threats are nuclear weapons and nuclear devices.In the future, the threat is less likely from a massive nuclear attack, but more likely from crude devices, such as Background