By Kelline Linton, Staff Writer
The physicists of the Foster Science building are adding nuclear fission experiments to their to-do list after the U.S. Department of Energy gave the ACU Physics Department (DOE) a $450,000 grant for nuclear research. The grant will be utilized throughout the next three years.
The DOE gave a total of $30.7 million to 38 American universities’ physics departments; ACU was the only exclusively undergraduate institution among the recipients.
ACU is one of six universities that will work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico with a collective budget of $3 million.
Dr. Tony Hill, (’90), was one of the principal investigators and main proposal drafters for the DOE grant.
To complete the grant’s requirements, professors of physics Dr. Donald Isenhower, Dr. Mike Sadler and Dr. Rusty Towell will lead a research team under DOE’s Nuclear Energy Research Initiative at Los Alamos Lab.
The research team will use a time projection chamber to measure the products of a reaction. Seeing this in three dimensions will help them then predict the probability of a reaction occurring.
The goal of this research is to improve the modeling of nuclear fission reactors for cleaner and more efficient power. The United States government has not built a nuclear reactor in the last 25 years. This research will provide essential information for future construction.
Nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly and reliable form of energy, Isenhower said.
“If you want to generate large amounts of power in the cleanest way possible without producing greenhouse gases, this is the most effective way of doing it,” Isenhower said.
A DOE grant is rewarded on the basis of a university’s ability to educate students and involve scientists within a singular experiment.
Physics students regularly work on grant projects during the summer as part of ACU’s internship program, and with the grant, two to four students will work on the Los Alamos’ nuclear fission experiment each year.
Los Alamos is roughly 518 miles from ACU, a proximity Sadler said will make it easier to involve undergraduates.
“There are very few, if any, schools in the country who can offer the type of research experience we do to our students,” said Paul Morris, professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics.
This experiment will require hands-on participation.
“It will be a good opportunity for us as faculty and our students to get involved in a research project that has very practical implications,” Sadler said. “It provides excellent summer opportunities for undergraduates to get involved in state-of-the-art research at a national laboratory.”
The DOE grant included funds to hire a post-doctoral fellow, a PhD graduate who would work as a substitute physics teacher, while Isenhower, Sadler and Towell periodically traveled to Los Alamos to work on the experiment.
This was the first grant the university received, including this extra benefit. The first DOE grant was awarded to ACU in 1982.
In the last 25 years the Physics Department received a total of nearly $3.3 million in grants and nearly $1.2 million for the current three-year cycle.
