Nuclear Research Reactors Dwindling in U.S. as Funding, Interest Drop

Fans who stormed the field after Oregon State University’s double-overtime victory over Oregon in the annual “Civil War” game may never know they were just a parking lot away from a relic of a far more dangerous conflict--the Cold War.

The university is home to one of the last research nuclear reactors operating on a college campus. It was built there with the belief that the atom could be harnessed for good instead of evil.

But that optimism has been worn away by a generation of apocalyptic visions of nuclear war. And with the Cold War threat a distant memory, students these days are mostly unaware of the power in their midst.

“I’d say the average OSU student doesn’t spend much time thinking about nuclear power or nuclear war,” said Mike Caudle, student government president. “A lot of them probably don’t even know where the reactor is.”

The waning support and lack of interest in nuclear power research has been followed by decreasing funding for programs around the country, forcing the closure of two to three reactors a year and cutting the number of campus reactors from 50 three decades ago to about half that today.

“It could be we’re looking at a vanishing technology,” said Michael Glascock at the University of Missouri, which has the nation’s largest research reactor. “Within the next 20 years, it may be gone.”

Reactor directors say nuclear research is drying up at universities everywhere, which may cost the nation some of its best engineers and physicists along with valuable improvements in technology and advances in basic science.

Most of the reactors were built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the public was swept up in the space program and the Disney promise of a “great big wonderful tomorrow” at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

But faith in nuclear power diminished after accidents at commercial reactors, such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, along with the nation’s largest bond default after the Washington Public Power Supply System halted construction on two of its three nuclear plants.

And researchers say a generation of Americans weaned on anti-nuke sentiment during the 1960s are unlikely to reach into their pockets for the tax funding needed to keep university reactors operating.

It doesn’t matter that the reactors are small, have never caused an accident and have contributed to scientific discoveries such as the reasons for the extinction of dinosaurs or analyzing evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy.

“I don’t think that people realize there are different reactors,” said John Bernard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research reactors generally are used to produce streams of atomic particles called neutrons, which can be used to analyze everything from moon rocks to paint chips from freighters suspected of midsea collisions.

Neutrons also have shown promise for treating rare brain tumors and advanced melanoma by targeting cancer deep inside the body with particles that destroy only the malignant cells.

“The public thinks they’re all producing electricity, but these research reactors are much like a microscope,” Bernard said. “You’re producing a beam of neutrons to see the world.”

At Reed College in Portland, the reactor is student-run.

Students on the small, wooded campus say they’re comfortable with the reactor because they all know the people operating it, said Jenne Wonner, a senior biology major whose boyfriend, Toby Boes, just got his reactor license.

“I’ve seen Toby working on it,” Wonner said. “I know how careful he is.”

Most of the paranoia of the Cold War is long gone, at least from Reed, said student Bob Foster.

“There might be some dreadlocked people who get totally flipped out about it at first--like, ‘Wow, man, what’s a reactor doing on campus?’ But it doesn’t last long,” Foster said.

At Oregon State, which has a larger reactor, the style is equally laid-back.

Erwin Schutfort, one of the principal OSU researchers, admits he feels a little like Homer Simpson--a cartoon favorite of university scientists--when yanking on a fishing pole to pull test samples from the glowing blue core of the OSU reactor.

“It’s a rather low-tech solution,” Schutfort says with a grin, dangling a line over the top of a deep pool of water lined with 82 rods of enriched uranium.

Unlike the animated nuclear plant in “The Simpsons,” safety has never been a problem for university reactors, which are reliable and well operated, even by young students, said Marvin Mendonca, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Funding is the real problem.

Most universities can’t afford state-of-the-art measurement equipment and instruments needed to run experiments. Many also must charge fees for research time, unlike national laboratories such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee, funded by the federal government, Bernard said.

Foreign governments and corporations plow huge amounts of money into their own research reactors.

“Europe outspends the United States 10 to 1 on neutron-scattering research,” he said.

University reactors may be aging, but their basic design is sound. The NRC has been approving relicensing requests because the operating lives of the research reactors can extend well into the next century.

And building new plants would be incredibly costly.

Glascock said the Missouri reactor cost about $3.5 million when it was built in the early 1960s. To build a similar reactor today would cost at least $200 million, he said.

The only hope for increased funding to maintain existing reactors may be neutron capture therapy, the technique used to target deep brain or melanoma tumors. A clinical trial is under way at MIT, and research also is being done at OSU and at Washington State.

If the therapy proves successful, medical funding may rescue many reactor centers.

“If that doesn’t happen, the future of nuclear reactors is pretty grim,” Bernard said.