After 37 years, Iowa’s first nuclear reactor, located on the Iowa State campus, will be closing down, along with the nuclear engineering program it served.

The nuclear reactor, which began operating in 1959, will be decommissioned within the next five years as a result of the discontinuing of the nuclear engineering program.

Daniel Bullen, head of the nuclear engineering program, said the faculty of the nuclear and mechanical engineering programs recently voted to cease offering master’s degrees in nuclear engineering by the fall of 1997. Undergraduate degrees in nuclear engineering have not been given since 1993.

The decision to end the nuclear engineering program was made after an academic review a year ago of the mechanical engineering program, and a suggestion which came with the review to close down the nuclear engineering program and with it the reactor.

Bullen said the nuclear engineering program will be eliminated because of a declining interest and dwindling job opportunities in nuclear engineering throughout the country.

“The decline we see is in demand for our students,” Bullen said. “They’re not building any more plants and they are downsizing others … It’s a tough market.” He said other universities are also discontinuing their nuclear engineering programs.

The nuclear engineering program was initiated at ISU in the early 1950s, Bullen said.

Since 1959, the nuclear reactor, located next to Sweeney Hall, has aided the nuclear engineering program through lab classes and research. But in the last two years, the reactor has not been used for anything but some minor experiments with high school students in the summer Talented and Gifted Programs, according Scott Wendt, the reactor manager.

Wendt said the reactor costs about $70,000 a year to operate.

He said N.E.S., a company from Danbury, Conn., will help decommission the reactor. The two-phase decommission process will take about five years. The first phase, which will cost about $115,000, will determine what kind of contaminants there are and how much material must be removed. The second phase will remove the nuclear fuel, which is contained in metal plates, and transport it to South Carolina, where it will be reprocessed. The materials surrounding the nuclear fuel, mostly concrete and graphite, are also radioactive because of years of being next to the fuel. They will be packaged in barrels and hauled to Nevada or South Carolina for burial, Wendt said. He said estimated costs for the second phase are between $1.2 and $2.2 million. Wendt said the costs for decommissioning the reactor will be paid by the university.

The monolith reactor is one of two in Iowa; the other is an energy producer in Cedar Rapids, has a power rating of 10 kilowatts and weighs between 150 to 180 tons, Wendt said. Less than 10 pounds is fuel.

Wendt said “we’re all disappointed” that the reactor must be decommissioned. He said even though nuclear engineering is a declining field right now, “we think nuclear’s a viable option and will make a comeback. But of course, a lot of us have been thinking this for a long time and it hasn’t happened yet.”