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DOE releases 2025 NEUP and NSUF funding
On March 3, the Department of Energy announced the release of $52.8 million in funds through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) and the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program, ending a wait for applicants seeking fiscal year 2025 funds.
NEUP supports U.S. colleges and universities with funding for nuclear technology development, early-career faculty research activities, undergraduate scholarships, and graduate fellowships.
“The NEUP funding, which has provided more than $1 billion in funding to universities since 2009, has been instrumental in training a strong cadre of graduate students in nuclear science and technology,” said Brian Wirth, Tennessee Valley Authority department chair of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville. “University research and education is the lifeblood of a successful industry and critically important to future growth.”
2025 CINR awards: Thirty-five Consolidated Innovative Nuclear Research (CINR) R&D projects were selected, receiving a total of $33.9 million. These are university-led projects covering microreactors, nuclear power plant optimization, advanced nuclear materials, manufacturing technologies, waste management, fuels, and more.
“These investments help attract strong students and support research in areas important to the future of nuclear energy, including advanced reactor design and nuclear system cybersecurity,” said Steven Biegalski, nuclear and radiological engineering and medical physics program director at Georgia Tech.
2025 IRP awards: Two Integrated Research Project awards were funded at $6.1 million. According to NEUP, these projects provide “solutions that are most directly relevant to the near-term, significant needs of the NE R&D programs.” These three-year awards are multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional, and this year’s projects include collaborators from multiple universities; Idaho, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories; and several companies, including TerraPower and Radiant.
2025 NSUF awards: Six projects were awarded user access to facilities and technical expertise at INL and NSUF partner sites through the NSUF program.
“The six NSUF user access awards are equal to approximately $7.2 million in support to accomplish the projects,” said Christopher Barr, NSUF program manager. “The NSUF funding does not go to the applicant, but it goes to support the associated project testing at the NSUF facility.”
Three of the six projects additionally received funding for research and development support through the NEUP program totaling $3.2 million.
2025 DEC awards: Three faculty were selected to receive Distinguished Early Career (DEC) awards totaling $2.4 million. As DOE-NE’s most prestigious award for faculty members beginning their independent careers, NEUP said these awards “pave new lines of inquiry and advance mission critical research directions in nuclear energy.”
The 2025 DEC award recipients are Syed Bahauddin Alam and Lorenzo Vergari, both assistant professors at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, and Yue Jin, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri.
Impact of timing: Universities have limited the number of students being admitted due to uncertainty about whether funds would be available to support tuition and stipends.
“The late notice of the project selections caused departments across the country to be cautious in recruiting new students last year. This was unfortunate timing, as the industry is on a rapid growth path and needing to attract the best and brightest,” said Todd Allen, associate dean for research at the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Wirth said that despite an increase in graduate applications this year, his department at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville has reduced the number of students admitted by nearly 40 percent year over year.
2026 Funding cycle: NEUP announced notices of funding opportunities for the fiscal year 2026 cycle on December 15, 2025, leading to questions about the status of the FY25 cycle, for which awards had not been released. Aaron Gravelle, director of the DOE’s Office of External Innovation, addressed this in a December NEUP Topics Area Q&A session about the 2026 cycle.
“Regarding the applications for the ’25 call, the official answer is that they are under review,” Gravelle said at the Q&A. “The challenge here for you and for everybody that submitted an application last year is that we’ve got a NOFO now in front of you without information related to whether or not you received an award or were selected last year. It’s going to be up to each PI to do their best and to make a decision on whether or not they want to submit an application that is different in the hopes that if you were selected for the ’25 CINR that you would have a new application that you would be submitting for ’26 as opposed to maybe the same application in ’25, so I think it’s just going to be a personal decision on how you manage that.”
Some of the FY26 award deadlines are approaching rapidly, with the Distinguished Early Career Program application deadline having just been extended to March 10, 2026.
