Although rumors have been swirling among students about the removal of the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, demolition will begin in early April to make way for the Student Innovation Center.

In addition to the Nuclear Engineering demolition, two sections of Sweeney Hall will also be leveled. The two recently built sections of Sweeney Hall will not be demolished. 

Those with offices and classes in the sections being torn down will be dispersed among empty campus spaces by the middle of February. Some of these moves will be temporary until they can be moved to the Student Innovation Center, scheduled to be complete in 2020.

Associate professor Gap-Yong Kim, manager of the Advanced Materials Processing Laboratory in Nuclear Engineering, sees positive and negatives in moving his laboratory.

Kim’s laboratory will be moving to the Applied Science Complex (ASC), which he estimated to be about five miles off campus. Although the equipment at ASC is better than that at Nuclear Engineering, he foresees that transportation could be problematic because busses only run once an hour.

“Students will lose a lot of time just waiting for busses or transportation. In that sense, it will probably be a little more inefficient,” Kim said.

He also pointed out that busses don’t run to ASC later in the evening or on the weekend, so students would have trouble accessing the laboratory then.

However, he is looking forward to the up-and-coming Student Innovation Center and thinks that undergraduate students will benefit from the various functions it will offer.

The new center is slated to cost $84 million and be approximately 140 thousand square feet. Besides an auditorium and some classrooms, much of it will be dedicated to collaboration and enhancing student learning.

The Nuclear Engineering Laboratory was constructed in 1934, but received its current name in 1959 the addition of nuclear reactor for teaching and research. The reactor functioned from 1959 to 1998 before its removal in 2000, according to Inside Iowa State. 

The two most southeastern parts of Sweeny Hall that are scheduled for demolition were constructed in 1927 and 1931, according to Inside Iowa State. The building has housed industrial and manufacturing engineering faculty research labs, graduate student offices and student organization like the solar car team.