ISU awarded nuclear research grant

Idaho State University could soon give schools such as M.I.T a run for its money, after the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program awarded ISU more than $600,000 in grant money this week.

Out of that, $400,000 will go toward the Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, where students and faculty will research ways to create benchmarks future nuclear designers around the world can measure the accuracy of their own models.

In layman’s terms: these guys will use this money to do a bunch of research way over most people’s heads in order to set a new standard everyone else in the world will use to make sure their nuclear computer models are on-par.

ISU nuclear science associate professor Dr. Chad Pope said these grants are extremely difficult to obtain since ISU is competing for that funding against every other university in the nation.

He said this research will not only help the nuclear world, but will also benefit local communities who will reap the benefits of ISU’s industry-changing research.

“We’re already on the map, and this keeps us there,” Pope said. “It helps us push the science forward and become preeminent in this field. It’s great for the university, it’s great for the community, and it will really help us establish ourselves as a prominent science university.”

Pope said the close connections ISU has with the INL and the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago could have also helped the department get recognized for this grant.

The money will span over a three-year time period, and once the research is complete, it’s expected to become published in the International Handbook of Evaluated Reactor Physics.