National Scientific User Facility
In April 2007, the ATR was designated a "National Scientific User Facility" to encourage use of the reactor by universities, laboratories, and industry. This status is intended to stimulate experiments to extend the life of existing commercial reactors and encourage nuclear power development. These experiments will test "materials, nuclear fuel, and instruments that operate in the reactors." Under this program, experimenters will not have to pay to perform experiments at the reactor, but are required to publish their findings. The interest from the academic community was seen at the 2009 ATR NSUF User's Week Conference, held in Idaho Falls, that attracted 32 different universities. There were five different university experiments assigned to the ATR in 2008, and another two in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Advanced Test Reactor
Famous quotes containing the words national, scientific, user and/or facility:
“I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.”
—Howard Barker (b. 1946)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Virtue rejects facility to be her companion.... She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)