Faculty Senate members debate shutting down Cornell's nuclear reactor

By Jacquie Powers

The Faculty Senate met Feb. 21 in a special continuation of the previous week's meeting to allow further discussion of a recommendation to decommission Cornell's nuclear reactor and phase out the Ward Center for Nuclear Sciences activities.

The Local Advisory Committee (LAC) also has recommended that Cornell maintain the Ward Center's Cobalt-60 Gamma Cell, a dry irradiation facility, at an appropriate local facility.

The controversial recommendation to shut down the center was made in a Feb. 6 report from the LAC, after Robert Richardson, vice provost for research, asked the committee to review the Ward Center and make a recommendation about its future.

At both the Feb. 14 regular meeting of the Faculty Senate and at last week's special meeting, faculty members from numerous fields and colleges lined up to speak on both sides of the issue.

Richardson explained that on Sept. 15 he asked for the review by the LAC, which is composed of faculty from a variety of fields, for two reasons. First, the original 1996 Faculty Senate resolution creating the Ward Center as a universitywide facility requested a review in the academic year 1998-99. The review is two years overdue. Second, he said, the relicensing of the reactor by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is scheduled for 2002-03, and the university must make a decision about continuing its operation before then.

The LAC interviewed Kenan Ünlü, director of the Ward Center, at least 30 users of the center across campus and others before drafting its findings and recommendation. According to the LAC's seven findings:

• There is no evidence for major safety concerns at Ward Center.

• Cornell does not currently have a substantial academic or research presence in the area of nuclear (fission) engineering.

• No compelling case was found for a strong connection between the existence of the Ward reactor and any role Cornell might play in a possible future resurgence in the field of nuclear power engineering.

• Reactors are being closed around the country for cost and programmatic reasons, even in universities with active nuclear science and engineering departments.

• The cost of continuing the operation of the Ward Center was clearly a major motivation for the initiation of the LAC review, as was the mandate from the Faculty Senate that such a review be conducted two years after establishing this university research center. However, the LAC only turned to consideration of these costs after first attempting to evaluate the impact of the reactor, both current and potential, on university research and academic programs.

• Given the absence of a significant Cornell academic program in nuclear engineering, the justification for the support and continuation of the Ward Center must be principally based on it serving effectively as a universitywide user facility. The evidence does not indicate that the Ward reactor, known as the TRIGA Mark II reactor, is having an important, major impact as a user facility for the Cornell community, either in research or in academics, that is proportionate with the overall cost of maintaining and operating Ward Center. Neither does the evidence indicate that the reactor is likely to be able to have such an impact in the future.

• There appears to be a substantial, cost-effective benefit to continuing the operation of the Gamma Cell, independent of the decision on the TRIGA reactor and the future of the Ward Center.

According to the LAC report, it costs Cornell approximately $200,000 a year to operate Ward Center.

Critics of the recommendation to close the center pointed out that it is being used increasingly and by an increasingly interdisciplinary group of faculty, students and corporations. Those using the center include researchers from veterinary medicine, food science, microbiology and immunology, soil, crop and atmospheric sciences, archeology, the arts and the humanities, as well as physics and nuclear science, they noted.

Others pointed out that many of those researchers came to the center for the Gamma Cell, not the reactor.

"Closing the reactor at this time neglects significant interdisciplinary research and actually causes far greater cost to the university if the cobalt facility is retained and moved, fails to be able to obtain funds from a government source and does not provide a space for other endeavors for many years because of all the bureaucracy associated with a closure," said Norman Scott, professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

Ünlü said Cornell's reactor is one of 26 operating university research reactors in the United States, and the only research reactor in New York state. He said that under its current operating status it is ranked 12th out of the 26. Moreover, he said, with an upgrade, it could be ranked 5th or 6th in terms of research.

LAC members said many of the 26 reactors are being maintained, but no longer used.

Ünlü noted that the number of nuclear engineering departments and programs and nuclear research reactors have been declining over the past two decades, attributable mostly to public misperceptions. Meanwhile, he said, that decline has alarmed the federal government, which has initiated a strong effort to rebuild U.S. nuclear energy research and education programs.

In fact, William Magwood IV, director of the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, has written four letters to Richardson, the Faculty Senate and others stating strong support for the center. Magwood noted that federal funding for the center increased from $3,000 in 1997-98 to more than $620,000 in 2000-01, although about half of that amount is support for future years. Further, he said, a bill being considered in the U.S. Senate would increase support of university research and teaching reactor facilities to more than $200 million over the next five years.

"Judging from the Ward Center's past performance and recent initiatives, we fully expect Cornell to be successful in securing funds to increase undergraduate and graduate educational benefits and to add more capabilities that will make the Ward Center more attractive to Cornell researchers," Magwood wrote in his Feb. 13 letter to the Faculty Senate.

He said in the letter that the U.S. Department of Energy has established a panel to review all university reactors, including their research and training capabilities and operating costs. The department will use this information to map a strategy to support maintenance of these facilities, he said, and urged that Cornell delay any decision on closing the center until that panel reports, in early April.

Joseph Burns, an LAC member and the I.P. Church Professor of Engineering and professor of astronomy, spoke in support of the LAC recommendation. He pointed out that while university subsidy for Ward Center, at $200,000, was comparable to the subsidy for other Cornell centers such as the Theory Center, CHESS and Arecibo, the other centers all bring in much more outside funding.

Further, he questioned whether user fees, if charged, would bring in much income. "Despite the claim to the contrary, Ward's reactor is not currently used by a broad cross-section of the university, and by very few that have any outside research dollars. For the last two years, nearly three-fourths of the operating hours were by Ward Center personnel, and most of the remainder was for a single project in geological sciences. In each of the past two years, the reactor was on for only three to four hours total for the whole year for the usage by all other departments."

According to J. Robert Cooke, dean of the faculty, the Faculty Senate will conclude its consideration of this issue at its March 14 meeting. Cooke recommended that the senate simply accept the report without taking a formal vote and forward to President Hunter Rawlings and Provost Biddy Martin for their consideration a transcript of the senate's three debates and the related documents that have been posted on the Faculty Online Forum. (The forum discussion can be accessed www.cornell.edu/UniversityFaculty/OnLineForum.html ). Cooke added that the University Faculty Committee probably will sponsor alternative resolutions at the March senate meeting.