Dive Brief:

• From 1957 until 2003, the University of Michigan used the Ford Nuclear Reactor on its Ann Arbor North Campus for a range of research, then decided that maintenance costs were making the program prohibitive.
• With 10 years of cleanup to purge the inevitable radiation in the structure, the 17,400-square-foot, four-story building is getting a new role as home to labs, offices, conference space and other facilities for the College of Engineering's Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences.
• The budget for the makeover is $11.4 million, and work is scheduled to be completed in fall 2015.

Dive Insight:

The building, which was built with $1 million from Ford Motor Company, housed a 28-foot-deep reactor. The work done there covered a range of applications from medicine to physics to anthropology, but never involved nuclear weapons. The lab was conceived of in 1947 as part of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, a war memorial devoted to only peaceful uses of nuclear energy.