Review Committee, 1997
In June 1997, the Ford Nuclear Reactor Review Committee submitted a report to the Vice President for Research (Vince Pecoraro, at the time) on the future of the FNR. The Committee estimated that the reactor was costing the university $1 million / year.
Letters had been sent to various university departments as well as to other institutions that made use of the reactor, asking for input on their use of the facility.
Profs. Alex Halliday and Eric Essene from the department of Geology relied heavily on the reactor for their research in Ar-40—Ar-39 aging, and sent strong praise of the reactor. Gary Was from the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences explained that over 15 NERS courses rely on the reactor, as well as nearly every professor's research. The Museum of Anthropology also suggested that the loss of the reactor would have serious adverse impacts on the students and faculty. Several other departments, such as the Chemistry department, said that they had not used the reactor in 30 years and did not plan to in the future.
Outside the University community, the Michigan State University Department of Geological Science, Louisiana State University, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Georgia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NIST, the NRC, Sandia National Labs, EPRI, Ford, and GM all expressed interest in keeping the reactor operational, while NASA (among others) had no interest.
The final decision was to shut down and decommission the reactor. The statement given by UM Vice President for Research was:
In recent years, however, the reactor's use by the U-M academic community has declined substantially to the point where the bulk of the users now come from the federal government and industry. Given this change, the University can no longer justify the reactor's substantial cost of operation, which now largely subsidizes non-University users.
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