Critical Materials Workforce Development at Idaho State University, Daniel LaBrier

in this next segment of our afternoon session we'll hear four oral presentations uh by different speakers so I'm delighted to welcome uh our first of these four Daniel laer joins us from Idaho State University good morning I'm just making sure everybody's awake okay uh thank you for having me I appreciate the organizers allowing me to to give a talk I want to take a few minutes to talk about some of the efforts that we're beginning out in Idaho where uh we do have a considerable considerable amount of resources that we've been into the critical materials and minerals category uh but I want to take a few minutes to talk about some of the efforts that we're kicking off at Idaho State University where I serve as an associate professor of nuclear engineering yes I said nuclear okay we're going to get to that in a little more detail later thank you I knew I'd get a couple of chers um I might get a couple of booze as well I understand um so in any case let me go ahead and proceed here um thankfully this is one graph that I haven't seen anyone put off put up yet so um this is one that the US doe put out uh as part of the energy act in 2020 as sort of a near-term projection for uh risk and availability for extraction uh retention of critical materials you're also going to note as I talk about this I'm going to refer a lot more to critical materials as opposed to critical minerals reason being that with our concentration since we don't have a traditional mining program or anything along those lines we're looking at both extraction and reprocessing means so we're kind of looking at both ends of the cycle there um as far as a critical material any nonu mineral element or substance that falls into the categories of high risk of supply chain disruption and essential function for one or more Energy Technologies now as a nuke you'll note that somewhere in the yellow see if I can do this right right up in there is uranium it's the only time I'm going to mention uranium as part of this talk because it really isn't the focus of why I'm here but I want to mention that it is considered a critical material as part of the uh uh display that's up here but there are actually a lot of materials that in my industry were very um they're very important including things like Cobalt uh vadium uh neodymium a lot of the rare earth materials that we hear so much about as part of the critical mineral and critical material campaign um you might not think of that necessarily as far as a nuclear engineering portfolio as it seems more geared towards uh semiconductor c electrical Technologies things of that nature so if you're not familiar with the state of Idaho particularly with the profile as far as uh critical resources go don't worry you're not alone neither am I um I am not an Idaho native matter of fact you will find more leers in Missouri than you will in Idaho uh guaranteed so uh just sort of a layout of where the it's very tough for you to see so I'll just kind of break it down there are a selection of mines and uh mining activities that span the entire State many of them have resources that are dedicated towards extraction of Rees um mostly on the light end a few on the heavy end a lot of them are metal and phosphate extraction facilities um and so one of the things that sort of draws me as an engineer and as a scientist in general towards this type of technology is not necessarily the pure extraction as part of the mining process but as has been discussed several times already dealing with the waste that's what I'm more interested in and part of that belies my background as a nuclear engineer where I deal with waste products um so this is something that's kind of near and dear to me as far as materials research goes um and I want to bring up I think it was Matthew who earlier mentioned the different RS that are brought up as part of the discussion for critical materials well I'm going to bring up one that hasn't been mentioned yet rad radioactive or radiological material also presents one of the opportunities for a lot of the permitting and regulation concerns that we deal with certainly in our industry and from what I'm hearing in your industry as well so one of my interests personally and one of our group's interests is how to make the materials that are part of particularly the waist streams more accessible looking at it from a bent of being a radiological Hazard as well as I'll say a typical mining uh waist stream wrong one so at IU and I'm going to mention that mention this a couple of times but we're relatively new to this game as in your probably thinking why in the world is someone from Idaho State here um reason being is because and you'll see in a couple of slides uh we were approached by a couple of Industry leaders in our area to consider options on what it would take to approach different waist streams within the mining industry specific to extraction and collection of critical materials um we are focusing in on like I said the rad side of things so whether that's Norm naturally occurring radiological or radioactive materials or torm technologically enhance Norm um mostly because we have a nuclear engineering department at ISU that goes all the way from certificate level all the way through the PHD level uh we also have significant ties to Industry government leaders that are in the area which I'll get to in just a second while we don't have a traditional mining degree matter of effect that's anywhere in the state of Idaho um we do offer a lot of the the roots that would go into uh a mining engineering or geological um sorry I was going to get to the geoscience as part of it um so geosciences anthropology uh chemistry and physics for obvious reasons and then the nuclear engineering which I've kind of discussed a little bit that's sort of our bent towards dealing with critical materials now I mentioned this last line here specifically because of some of the expertise that I and a couple of my colleagues bring to this group at AO state is some of our research has been dedicated towards extraction of different materials elements or compounds from mixed radiological waste specifically from materials that have come from used nuclear fuel product now you're not going to hear that very often and when you do usually that has loads of red tape paperwork up to about here and a lot of safety regulations that go along with it and typically a lot of aquous waste well some of the research that we've done and tied in with our partners for the past 20 years or so are actually dedicated towards non aquous separation techniques and this is involved groups within nuclear engineering physics chemistry and geosciences so without further Ado Workforce de vment who has a really good definition of that that's what I thought okay so what is it it's it means something different to everyone and that's fine um from our point of view put it in very simplistic terms knowledge and know how I can provide the information I can provide the tools and sort of the inherent knowledge uh through experience on how to be able to perform the work that's needed to get you into and progressing through your industry uh opening that up for local and for regional students initially because this is a somewhat a project that's in its infancy if you will and so we're really in the point of and I say this literally we were just approached in the spring about doing this so this is not even a year old initiative um but actually considering developing the types of courses and certificate programs that are sort of necessary to build the foundation of what we need for a critical materials program at Idaho State um the access to uh the mins the industries for processing um The Regulators themselves the state entities that go into that um target hires within our departments and within the community to go along with the technical bases that are need for the extraction da da da D this feels like something very old testament where so and so begat so and so begat so and so that's how a lot of these things have to build upon each other and then lastly I put up here is our partnership with Idaho National Lab and most people go whoa whoa whoa whoaa first off how many people have heard of Idaho National Lab okay I'll put that at 50% plus or minus 10 um most people would not think of critical materials when it comes to Idaho National Lab you're going to think well nukes all right reactors if you want to think of it that way well as I mentioned earlier one we need a lot of these materials when it comes to especially development of oh pick your reactor type of the day micro reactors small modular reactors molten salt reactors I could go on for days please don't let me but what has really kind of come to the attention at inl because it's you know government world we have to use acronyms for everything um what's working with inl is they decided to prop up their own critical materials initiative and I am not here necessarily to be a shill forl but I will at least mention the fact that they have developed this and they are one of the industry Partners who reached out to us to say hey would you be willing to tackle this particular subset of critical materials research as something that can supplement what we're going to be doing at the lab they obviously have a lot more money you know as was mentioned before it all comes down to the funding and the capabilities they have more uh people they have more equipment we have the students the workforce that they're going to want and hopefully that your industries are going to want to be able to help further your industries um I took this directly from their website take into that what you will um I serve as a joint appointment for them but I'm completely unpaid so I literally don't get a nickel from them that's okay uh if you're not tied to the money sometimes it's help all right so I've joked around long enough um I want again want to thank you for your time um I also want to mention uh some of the reasons why we're we're interested we really are interested in doing this in Idaho um mostly because we feel this is a place that we have the ability to contribute and we have a lot of the I'll say background expertise to jump into the game even though we realize that we are coming in well behind uh you know places like msnt Colorado School of Minds uh South Dakota School of Minds that sort of thing a lot of other institutions that are well ahead of us that's okay we just want to contribute where we can um it's usually at this point that I would say thank you and do you have any questions but you are the ones that should be ready for questions because I've got a ton of them okay thank you very much