Abstract
The United States (US) Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) was formally established in January 1998 as part of the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) Recommendation 97-2 implementation plan. The NCSP was initially focused on seven NCSP tasks: Critical Experiments, Benchmarking, Analytical Methods, Nuclear Data, Training and Qualification, Information Preservation and Dissemination, and Applicable Ranges of Bounding Curves and Data. The first NCSP 5-year plan was published in August 1999. Now, more than 20 years later, NCSP continues to serve the United States and the nuclear criticality safety (NCS) community around five technical program elements (TPEs): Analytical Methods, Information Preservation and Dissemination, Integral Experiments, Nuclear Data, and Training and Education. NCSP has three chartered support groups, the Criticality Safety Support Group, the Nuclear Data Advisory Group, and the DOE Criticality Safety Coordinating Team, all of which provide technical advisement to the NCS community, to DOE, and to the NCSP manager. NCSP has a comprehensive mission and vision document that provides technical and budget priorities for TPE attributes and goals to ensure that the needs of the NCS community and DOE NCS are prioritized appropriately to meet the goals defined by the 1998 DNFSB recommendation. Like any DOE/NNSA program, NCSP faces significant challenges in the future that involves program funding, rising nuclear facility costs, aging critical assembly infrastructure, knowledge retention, and other issues. This paper discusses NCSP and provides some insights into these and other challenges moving into the future.
