INL’s cultural resources management office provides a historic look at nuclear-related artifacts. Here’s a look inside.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: EastIdahoNews.com is working with the Idaho National Laboratory this year to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Each month, we’ll publish stories highlighting the history, achievements and trials of the U.S. Department of Energy’s desert site. We’ll explore the INL’s influence on eastern Idaho, and its day-to-day impact on local people.
IDAHO FALLS — From the formation of the National Reactor Testing Station on the desert near Arco to the growth of an Idaho Falls campus managed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Idaho National Laboratory is a place where history is made.
For years, many items and documents associated with historic INL achievements were scattered throughout the desert and Idaho Falls campus collecting dust. Today, the INL is making an effort to preserve and document these artifacts in one location. That’s the purpose of the Secure Access Facilities building.
Located off North Boulevard in Idaho Falls, the cultural resources management office inside the building contains thousands of items yet to be documented. Austin Schulz and Alana Haack are the archivists who manage and oversee this effort.
The pair haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s in the archives and are discovering new items every day.
One of the items in storage is a light bulb similar to the ones that were lit by atomic power for the first time at Experimental Breeder Reactor I on Dec. 20, 1951.
“It was lit at EBR-I (but not with nuclear power),” Schulz tells EastIdahoNews.com. “I think they had a whole bunch of light bulbs and would switch them out. This just happens to be one of the bulbs (they had in stock at the time).”
The work at EBR-I led to Arco becoming the first city in the world to be lit by atomic power four years later. The BORAX-III reactor was used in that experiment.
EBR-I was shut down in 1964 after successfully lighting a second string of light bulbs with a plutonium core the year before. EBR-II went online and continued the work EBR-I began.
“EBR-II is what we used to make (the process of generating electricity from nuclear fuel) more efficient. We were putting out more electricity and were able to use more fuel,” Haack explains.
EBR-II was the prototype for what became the Integral Fast Reactor, which could reprocess used fuel.
From the beginning, EBR-I and EBR-II used nuclear power for peaceful means. Still, the use of plutonium at EBR-II made some people fearful. Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were at their height and there was a general sense of fear surrounding the possibility of nuclear war.
Haack says the public’s perception led to EBR-II’s demise. It was shut down in 1994, along with the IFR project.
Though it’s been 50 years since a nuclear reactor has been built at the INL, the lab is beginning the first of at least a dozen reactor projects that will be built by the end of the decade. The Microreactor Applications Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) project is the first of multiple planned reactors and could be operational as soon as 2026.
“(It) will produce about 85 kilowatts of heat — which will be converted to approximately 20 kilowatts of electricity. A reactor this size would power around 10 homes,” according to a news release about the project.
The idea behind MARVEL is to give researchers and business owners the understanding of how to build and operate a microreactor in hopes of making them a widespread reality.
Haack is thrilled the INL is building nuclear reactors again and says misinformation may be one reason why reactors haven’t been a focus at the INL for so long.
“It takes people a long time to calm down from what I’ve noticed. When I was giving tours at EBR-I, a lot of people would say, ‘How could you possibly be ok with working here?’ We’d go through the history and talk about what we’re doing now and (they’d realize they were misinformed),” says Haack.
Schulz showed us some artifacts that were used around nuclear reactors in the INL’s early history. Watch it in the video above.
Brought to you by Idaho National Laboratory. Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, celebrating 75 years of scientific innovations in 2024.