ISU ‘powering Idaho’s energy future’ with second nuclear reactor
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POCATELLO – Local and state leaders gathered on Idaho State University’s campus to announce an upcoming project that will result in the university having a second nuclear reactor on campus.
On Wednesday morning, these leaders spoke to a crowd gathered along Alvin Ricken Drive, next to a 275-acre research park where an “advanced nuclear microreactor,” called the Advanced Research and Test reactor, is planned to operate. If completed, the project, described as an “advanced nuclear microreactor,” will join ISU’s first reactor in educating students in the future of nuclear power generation.
“We are committed to powering Idaho’s energy future. This project directly fulfills our commitment by driving nuclear energy research, microreactor innovation, and specialized workforce training that, frankly, no other institution in the country has,” ISU President Robert Wagner said.
Gov. Brad Little spoke at the event and boasted about how far ahead of the rest of the country Idaho has been in nuclear power. During the period when the development of nuclear energy had slowed, Little said that Idaho continued to make investments where it counted.
“When people talk about the new nuclear, I say we’ve been doing nuclear in Idaho for a long, long time. It’s just the rest of the world and the rest of the country finally caught up with us,” Little said.
The microreactor is being developed through a public-private partnership with NuCube Energy, an Idaho Falls-based company working to develop nuclear microreactors, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Innovation Center Launch Pad USA program. The project is slated to be NuCube’s first reactor, and Cristian Rabiti, Ph.D, CEO and co-founder of NuCube, is happy that it will be close to home.
“I’m glad that it’s only 50 miles south from where I live, in the sense that it’s kind of nice to have the possibility to build our first reactor close to home,” Rabiti said.
The way Rabiti sees it, this is a partnership that extends past just building a microreactor with the university.
“We really see this as not only building a reactor, but building a partnership of innovation. … The project is the fruit of the partnership rather than the project itself,” Rabiti said.
And while the new reactor is called a microreactor, it will actually be slightly larger than ISU’s existing nuclear reactor, called AGN-201, said project leader Daniel LaBrier, Ph.D., in an interview with EastIdahoNews.com.
“The design of the reactor, though, is actually relatively simple, in that it has very few moving parts, which is like (AGN-201),” LaBrier said.
But in stark contrast to the current reactor, the microreactor should produce “substantially more thermal power.”
“The thermal energy we produce from (AGN-201) is five watts. It’s not completely zero, but it’s relatively low. We would be looking at producing somewhere on the order of three or four megawatts, so a million times more thermal power,” LaBrier said.
And with this increase in thermal power comes the potential for further partnerships.
“The new reactor is going to be really interesting, because our plan is to have research and industrial partners come in and find ways to tap into that heat, because that’s the resource,” LaBrier said.
The project is still in its planning stages, and there’s no clear date when construction will begin, but Rabiti hopes to embark on many more projects with the university after this one.
“So I really hope that, maybe in two years, we’ll be here and look to the next project, and the next project again, together with ISU. … Let’s make it happen,” Rabiti said.