page_title: More Hall Annex
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: More Hall Annex / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Interior, University of Washington Nuclear Reactor Building also known a More Hall Annex; opened in 1961, the reactor stopped operating in 1988, fuel rods were removed in the years that followed, decontamination continued in 2006. Added to Washington State list of historic places in 2008 and to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
context_page_description: The More Hall Annex, formerly the Nuclear Reactor Building, was a building on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States, that once housed a functional nuclear research reactor. It was inaugurated in 1961 and shut down in 1988, operating at a peak of 100 kilowatts thermal, and was officially decommissioned in 2007.
  The reactor was housed in a reinforced concrete building designed in the Brutalist architectural style by UW faculty members. They designed the reactor room with large windows that allowed observation from the outside, in an attempt to demonstrate the safety of nuclear energy.
  The Nuclear Reactor Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, after a campaign led by an architecture student in response to the proposed demolition of the building. A later demolition plan prompted a lawsuit from preservation groups, which ended with a court ruling exempting the building from the city's landmarks-preservation ordinance. While this decision was eventually overturned, the university demolished the building in July 2016 and replaced it with a new computer science building that opened in February 2019.
context_section_description: During the late 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) provided universities and colleges with grants to acquire small nuclear reactors for research programs. The University of Washington began nuclear engineering classes as part of the College of Engineering in 1953 and formed a Department of Nuclear Engineering in 1956, accepting engineers from Boeing and the nearby Hanford Site as its first students. The Nuclear Engineering department used training reactors at Bagley Hall and later proposed that the university acquire a nuclear reactor to be installed on campus. In 1957, the AEC approved $100,000 in funding (equivalent to $697 thousand in 2018 dollars) for the University of Washington to install a permanent nuclear reactor on the campus, the first of its kind in the United States.
  The proposed 10 kW reactor was approved by the university's Board of Regents in April 1959, to be housed in a two-story reinforced concrete building with offices, workshops, a control room, and class and seminar spaces. The building was designed by TAAG architects Wendell Lovett, Gene Zema and Daniel Streissguth, all members of the UW faculty. In December, the regents awarded the construction contract to Jentoft & Forbes, paying $308,082 (equivalent to $2.07 million in 2018 dollars) for the project. A site at the eastern edge of the campus was chosen for its proximity to various academic engineering buildings and its visibility to the public.
  The AEC granted an operating license for the reactor to the university in April 1961, and the reactor began operating with a self-sustained nuclear reaction on April 10. It was officially dedicated on June 1, in a ceremony attended by Argonne National Laboratory director Norman Hilberry, a physicist who worked on Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor to achieve criticality. During the 1962 World's Fair, hosted by the city at the Seattle Center, the reactor became the subject of group tours from professional organizations.
  Throughout the 1960s, the reactor was used for medical research by the university's School of Medicine and local hospitals, with a staff of six full-time employees and four part-time staff (most of whom were students who worked for the U.S. Navy's nuclear programs). In 1966, the university and local law enforcement agencies proposed converting the reactor into a part-time laboratory for forensic science. By 1975, the reactor had only used 10 grams (0.35 oz) of its 3,300 g (120 oz) of uranium-235 fuel.
caption: Interior of the decommissioned reactor room, photographed in 2009
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