I think the idea is a huge waste, but the Utah State Legislature already considered exactly this in 2022 (building a massive pipeline to the Pacific Ocean).
I don’t know the exact year the CDRS group was acquired by PTC, but it be around the same time I attended the same High School Computing Institute in 1996.
East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).
The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.
After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.
Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.
Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S.
CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler.
After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept.
I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space.
So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…
Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull will both be speaking next week (March 24th) at the 50 year celebration of the University of Utah Computer Science Department.
I doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus.
If a reactor were located on the BYU campus, I would expect it to be public knowledge and tracked by the IAEA.
I used to work on the top floor of MEB for many years and had the opportunity to see the glow of the core in the pool of water on multiple occasions.
Tangentially, the UofU reactor made national headlines last week when a student made a threat to blow it up if the football team lost [3].
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2022/05/19/utah-legi... (archived non-paywall version: http://archive.today/GzuUD)