U. S. DOE Reactor Sharing Program

NOTE:    The Reactor Sharing Program has been suspended for the 2007-2008 fiscal year due to the funding being cut by DOE, therefore no support is available at this time.  Funding may be restored in the future, so please feel free to check the current status by using the contact information below.

Program Purpose

The United States Department of Energy grants funding to university research reactors which are willing to share facilities and expertise with other educational institutions that do not have reactor facilities.  The University of Wisconsin Nuclear Reactor has shared available services through this program. Educational institutions such as universities, colleges, junior/community colleges, technical institutes/colleges, high schools, and middle schools are eligible to participate in the program. The UW Reactor Laboratory is reimbursed by DOE for the services provided to meet educational and research goals of the user institution (travel and equipment purchase funding are not available under this program). Permissible services range from Ph. D, M.S. and undergraduate thesis research to facility tours and nuclear power information provided to touring groups. A listing of past and proposed future use by other institutions follows; feel free to contact us about other interests.

Instruction

Classes from user institutions have come to our campus for laboratory experiences ranging from two-hour demonstrations of reactor operating characteristics to weekly laboratory sessions on neutron activation analysis which ran for a full semester. Other institutions have selected one or more of our department laboratory sessions on nuclear instrumentation or reactor physics. Still others have elected specific laboratory experience with high-resolution gamma ray spectroscopy or neutron counting instruments. Click here for some experiments which may be performed at our facility.

For those groups not able to visit our facility, we can also irradiate and/or count samples and provide you with resulting spectra on computer disk in various formats, ranging from raw spectral data that can be viewed with a simple browser program to analyzed spectra with peak centroid energies and count-rates of all peaks or activity in counts/second in a format that can be imported into a spreadsheet program. Click here to see samples of available formats for NAA or gamma spectroscopy data. Finally, we can loan a computer program that will allow remote (internet or modem) access to one of our computer-based multi-channel analyzers, allowing students in your PC equipped labs to view, manipulate, and analyze spectra.

Instruction Support

We provide repair and calibration of radiation detection equipment. We maintain calibrated counters for wipe and leak tests, and can provide "leak test kits" which you use and return to us for counting. We can also, on a limited short-term basis, provide loans of radiation survey equipment or a Geiger-Mueller counter and software which will allow any PC with a serial port to serve as a counter/recorder which can be used for several high school and undergraduate experiments.

Research Support

Radioisotope production, irradiation of seeds or crystals with neutrons or gamma rays from the shutdown reactor core, neutron activation analysis, neutron radiography, or any other research application that requires neutrons being absorbed in materials are possible. Most of our previous research use has been neutron activation analysis (NAA) of materials. NAA has been used on a wide variety of materials, ranging from archeological samples to waste materials. (More information on neutron activation analysis is here.)

Last Modified: 9/5/2007