Workers from Duke Engineering & Services, Bolton, Mass., will begin the demolition and removal of Iowa State’s 10-kilowatt, 150-ton nuclear teaching reactor later this month.

This project comes after the decision by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to approve the university’s plan to decommission the reactor.

The reactor was built by Iowa State’s College of Engineering in November 1959 and was operable until May 1998.

Scott Wendt, formerly the reactor manager and currently an associate scientist at Iowa State, said the university began the decommissioning process in February 1998.

“Our license was actually good until October 2003, but with the closing of the undergraduate nuclear engineering program in the early ’90s and the graduate program in ’95, it became necessary to start planning to decommission it,” Wendt said.

Daniel Bullen, associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of Iowa State’s nuclear engineering program, said once the decision to decommission the reactor was made official, the university was required to develop a decommissioning plan. After selecting a contractor in fall 1998, a plan was made and submitted to the NRC in January 1999, he said.

“The NRC took a year and a half to approve the plan,” Bullen said. “In May 2000, we got official notification that it was approved.”

The actual demolition is expected to take three to five weeks, and all cleanup and removal of the reactor is expected to be finished by Aug. 15, Bullen said. Once completed, the NRC will need to approve a final report by the university before releasing Iowa State from its license.

The teaching reactor was one of the first of its kind to be operated by a university in the United States, and it served as a teaching and research tool while in use. With the merging of the ISU nuclear engineering program and the mechanical engineering program, it became necessary for the university to decommission the reactor, Wendt said.

“Financially, it was impossible to justify keeping the reactor operable on campus,” Wendt said. “But I am still sad to see it go. Students in Iowa who want to study nuclear engineering will now have to go out of state.”

Bullen, who studied the reactor as an undergraduate at Iowa State, expressed the same sentiments over the demolition.

“I have mixed emotions about it,” he said. “The decommission decision is the right one. It was mainly a teaching tool and there wasn’t research being done with it, but it’s a little sad for me.”

The space now occupied by the reactor belongs to the mechanical engineering department, which will reassign the space for future use.