The IVEM Facility is a partner with the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF). Users can continue to have no-cost to user access to the IVEM through the NSUF, and the NSUF will reimburse the IVEM according to the costs of the user experiments for awarded proposals.

Users can also have direct access to the IVEM without going through the NSUF proposal process, by paying a user fee based on full cost recovery. Please contact IVEM (630-252-5222, 630-252-5111) for the detailed process.

Users who wish to have NSUF-funded access to the IVEM can submit an NSUF Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) proposal or a proposal through the Consolidated Innovative Nuclear Research Funding Opportunity Announcement (CINR FOA). More information about the CINA FOA is available on the Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) website.

The RTE Call is open to any interested researcher and is not restricted to U.S. universities or colleges. Proposals from Principal Investigators not from a U.S. entity will be accepted as long as the proposal contains a co-Principal Investigator who is from a U.S. university, national laboratory, domestic entity, or foreign entity incorporated in the U.S.

IVEM beam time proposals may not exceed 10 days per RTE proposal.

RTE proposals receive 3 sets of reviews:

• Program Relevance – it is extremely important that your Program Relevance Abstract shows clearly that your project is relevant to DOE-NE programs. Your proposal may be rejected if it is deemed not relevant to DOE-NE programs.
• Feasibility – please contact us before submitting a proposal to discuss your proposed experiment to ensure that your proposed experiment is feasible.
• Technical – proposals are evaluated on scientific merits (50%), technical feasibility (30%), and capability of research team (20%).

RTE Proposal Submission:

The NSUF issues three Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) Calls per year. All awarded RTE instrument time must be scheduled within 3 months of the award, and the RTEs must be completed within 9 months of the date of the award. Details of the NSUF RTE Call and submission can be found on the NSUF website: https://​nsuf​.inl​.gov/

RTE proposals can be submitted and viewed through MY NSUF on the NSUF home page.

A step-by-step guide to submitting a RTE proposal is given in this pdf file.