ND Energy-affiliated faculty member, Jay LaVerne, professional specialist at the Radiation Laboratory and concurrent professor of Physics, has joined a "dream team" of experts to study the chemical reactions that cause nuclear waste to change over time, with the goal of identifying safe, permanent storage for the radioactive material. The nuclear waste is left over from the Manhattan Project, a research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II. LaVerne received a grant of $448,000 for his role in the project, in which he will study radiolytic decomposition, or how radioactivity dissolves aluminum oxides, in the watery, high alkaline environment of the waste tanks.