Jefferson students create part for nuclear plant

CEDAR RAPIDS - Collin Steimer and Max McChesney don't look like nuclear power plant engineers.

On a late May morning at Jefferson High School, their Jefferson T-shirts and athletic shorts make them blend in with the handful of other students in the school's manufacturing lab. The two boys have a baseball game later in the day, and they plan to win.

But Steimer and McChesney, both 17 and just finishing their junior year, already have received a taste of the engineering profession they hope to study in college, having designed a part now in use at the NextEra Energy Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo.

Steimer's father, Kevin, is the head of the instrumentation and controls maintenance department at Duane Arnold. He oversees tests of electrical connections in the nuclear plant, called relays, that trigger alarms or valves and help control the plant's temperature, among other things.

Duane Arnold technicians traditionally used pieces of rubber shrink tubing to cover one part of a relay connection and test it without actually opening or closing a valve or setting off an alarm.

But those tubes - called 'relay blocks” - don't fit well with some of the relays at the plant. Last July, one of the relays made an accidental connection during a test and closed a valve, causing a manageable problem for the plant but worrying supervisors.

'We told ourselves, let's go find a better way,” Kevin Steimer said. 'But we didn't really know” how to get there, he added.

A few months later, Steimer said, he took the problem home to share with his son. Collin then worked with McChesney to create a new relay block, one that is easier to install, using a 3D printer and the design skills they learned in Jefferson's computer-integrated manufacturing class.

Duane Arnold now uses that part to test some of its relays.

'We wanted to make it easy and slick,” Steimer said. 'In this class, we base ourselves off a design process. My dad came with a problem, and then me and Max developed solutions.”

The final product - the third version the boys designed - is a small, simple-looking piece of plastic. But having the high school students design it brought a fresh perspective to the project, Kevin said.

'If they wouldn't have been able to come up with something, we probably would still be trying to,” Steimer said.

The project provided a broader education and more real-world experience than a class assignment could have, said Vince Roth, the boys' teacher in the manufacturing class.

'That's the ultimate goal,” Roth said. 'Now, looking back, this is something I want to incorporate more.”

As thanks, Duane Arnold managers invited Roth's class to the plant for a tour. Kevin said he would be proud to see his son back there one day as an employee.

'They're aspiring young engineers,” Kevin Steimer said of the students. 'We could use some of their help someday.”