With nearly $1 million in its purse, the ISU Center for Nondestructive Evaluation has joined forces with the Ames Laboratory to conduct research on safety systems for the next generation of nuclear power reactors.

The project, called Online Nondestructive Evaluation for Advanced Reactor Designs, will be funded by a $940,000 grant from the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative. It is part of a yearly $50 million congressional allocation to the Department of Energy. Ames Lab will receive $300,000 before Oct. 1 for the first phase of the three-phase project.

“The basic philosophy was that the country’s ability to develop nuclear energy was rapidly diminishing,” said R. Bruce Thompson, director of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation.

“Few universities were teaching courses in nuclear energy,” he said, “and if you look to the future, we were going to have an absence of technical talent in that area.”

The Department of Energy research grants were distributed to fund nuclear research, said Mary Jo Glanville, public affairs coordinator for the Institute for Physical Research and Technology.

“The long-term purpose is to ensure the safety of nuclear reactors,” she said.

The Ames Lab’s grant will be used to develop `in-situ’ sensors, which would be installed directly in reactors to give periodic readouts of a running nuclear system. This way, cracks or structural flaws would be constantly monitored, said Thompson, professor of materials science and aerospace engineering.

The sensors will be designed for placement in new reactors designed by Westinghouse, one of the corporations that funds the center.

“These future generation reactors are much more self-contained and will have a much longer time between being turned off for refueling,” Thompson said. “If your opportunity for inspection . is much less frequent, you have to figure out some other way.

“When [conventional nuclear power plants] shut down, a crew of people come up and with ultrasonic transducers . a little robot would scan the structure,” he said. “You can’t bring that crew of people in at the same sort of intervals for these much more self-contained reactors. So you have to build sub-sensors and leave them there.”

The Center for Nondestructive Evaluation will be juggling whether to use ultrasonic, electromagnetic or X-ray sensors within the systems, according to the needs of the system Westinghouse designs, Thompson said.

“We are answering the engineering question – what kind of sensor should be developed?” he said.

Since most of today’s power plants were designed more than 30 years ago, there is a need for new reactors, Thompson said.

“They had a certain design life,” he said. “At some point in time, they are going to reach the end of their useful life.”

Glanville said advancing nuclear technology is important.

“It’s another way of providing energy and insuring safety,” he said.

Out of the 145 applicants, only 12 other labs received similar grants this year.

“In fact, we did submit a year ago and weren’t successful,” he said, “so we learned from the reviews and modified our submission and were successful on the second go-around.”