INL and ISU launch new SUPER research agreement
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IDAHO FALLS — Idaho National Laboratory and Idaho State University are embarking on a new era of research collaboration, announcing a Strategic Understanding for Premier Education and Research (SUPER) agreement on Wednesday at the lab’s headquarters in Idaho Falls.
Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner and Idaho State University President Robert Wagner signed the agreement during a news conference at the Engineering Research Office Building, expanding the entities’ joint research efforts for the next five years.
“We are particularly focused on collaborations in two areas that are important to the economic prosperity of the state of Idaho as well as the nation … and those are critical and strategic materials and minerals and environmental sustainability and security,” John Wagner said.
The agreement will foster cutting-edge research in “carbon reduction, sequestration and storage technologies, digitalization and artificial intelligence, geothermal energy, and spent fuel storage and disposition,” according to an INL news release.
Robert Wagner described the university’s partnership with INL as “multi-dimensional.”
More than 1,200 of INL’s 6,200 employees have obtained one or more degrees from Idaho State University.
“We are preparing, as an institution, the workforce that comes to work here at INL, and now your workforce is helping us teach,” Robert Wagner said. “We have not only joint appointments for research, but we have INL employees who are adjunct professors/instructors in our classes.”
The university provides unique opportunities to leverage educational programs into employment at the laboratory.
“We’re just not talking about PhD programs or nuclear engineering, although those are critically important,” Robert Wagner said. “We’re talking about our College of Technology certificates (and) associate degrees. Those students are … going right to work and finding incredible jobs here and contributing to the community. “
“In the last five years, we’ve had more than 220 interns from Idaho State University,” John Wagner said.
The two organizations will “share academic materials and host joint symposia, seminars, workshops and conferences — building upon their existing, shared nuclear energy, high-performance computing and cybersecurity efforts,” the release stated.
The agreement will also facilitate vital research to strengthen U.S. national security.
“(This) collaboration involves evaluating techniques for long standoff detection of nuclear materials and developing capabilities for waste imaging and elimination of chemical weapons,” John Wagner said.
Additionally, the partnership will advance efforts to bolster American supplies of critical minerals for technological development and national defense.
On Tuesday, China announced that it would ban exports of gallium, germanium, antimony to the United States in retaliation for U.S. restrictions on Chinese semiconductor imports, according to the Associated Press.
“We are currently nearly 100% dependent on these elements from foreign nations, many of them from China,” said INL Chief Geologist Travis McLing. “So developing our own domestic supply chain is absolutely paramount to the United States national security and to our ability to develop our own technologies into the future.”
John Wagner stated that Idaho contains significant deposits of two or three of the elements banned by China along its border with Montana.
ISU and INL’s research will focus on “bringing the technology to bear to bring cost-competitive minerals to the market with environmentally safe and secure ways of doing the processing and the mining,” McLing said, bolstering Idaho’s economy and developing the domestic supply chain for strategic minerals.
Finally, the partnership is essential for developing a trained workforce as the nuclear industry makes critical leaps forward in the United States and internationally.
“There’s nowhere on the planet … that there’s this much research and development happening in nuclear energy than right where we are standing,” said Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) Mustafa Mashal, who represents ISU at the facility. “This place is not just changing the energy trajectory for the state of Idaho, but actually for the world, with all the expansion happening with advanced reactors that are coming up.”
Since 2020, the total number of employees at INL has increased 25%.
Mashal represents Idaho State University, which is a partner in the CAES facility on INL’s campus in Idaho Falls.
“Nuclear energy is going to be tripled by 2050,” Mashal said.
He said the university is uniquely positioned to provide mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, civil engineers, surveyors and more with the specific preparation they need to enter the industry.
Recently, the two institutions worked together to “develop the world’s first operating nuclear reactor digital twin,” John Wagner said. “… It combines a virtual model of ISU’s AGN-201 nuclear reactor, machine learning and the physical reactor, … demonstrating their ability to replicate reactors.”
But the history of collaboration between Idaho State University and the nation’s premier nuclear research laboratory extends clear back to the lab’s creation in 1949.
For the past 25 years, the two institutions have teamed up at ISU’s Idaho Accelerator Center to research “photo-induced fission, isotopes production and provide critical isotopes for INL’s work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense,” the site director stated.
INL lecturers, scholars and guests also speak regularly at ISU’s Energy Systems Technology and Education Center.
Looking to the future, the two leaders (who are not related) hope ISU and INL’s partnership will help drive the advancements needed to secure America’s energy future.
“This SUPER agreement now positions us for the next phase of collaboration with that strong foundation to build off,” John Wagner said.
ISU has successfully recruited faculty who are performing state-of-the-art research in each of these areas, Robert Wagner said.
“Just the idea of our relationship evolving into critical and strategic materials and minerals, as well as environmental sustainability and security — strategically speaking, it’s incredibly important for our state, for the Intermountain West (and) for the nation as a whole,” Robert Wagner said.
