Company History

MOHR was founded in 1983 with the goal of improving nuclear safety. MOHR co-founder Dr. Charles Mohr was project manager of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) large-break loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) experiments carried out in the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor at Canada's Chalk River National Laboratory from 1978-1983. These comprehensive experiments were designed to study mechanical deformation, flow blockage, and coolability during heatup, reflood, and quench phases of a large-break LOCA (NUREG/CR-1882, NUREG/CR-1208) and involved extensive instrumentation of 32 full-length (12 ft.) nuclear fuel rods. Time-domain reflectometer (TDR) liquid level probes developed by Dr. Mohr were a key component of the test train instrumentation package(NUREG/CR-3272).

Following the series of successful LOCA experiments at the NRU facility, MOHR was founded with NRC financial support to continue development of reactor safety instrumentation. MOHR subsequently developed Electric Field Perturbation (EFP) technology, an ultrawideband (UWB) guided-radar technology that addresses the weaknesses inherent in existing guided-radar / TDR-based instrumentation. EFP Series instruments are the industry's only multiphase flow sensors designed to provide real-time estimation of total liquid coolant inventory and coolability within boiling water (BWR) and pressurized water (PWR) nuclear reactors. They can be used to faciitate early detection of loss-of-coolant accidents such as the Three Mile Island incident, and can also help improve BWR and PWR operating efficiency.

The CT100 Series Automated Metallic TDR Cable Tester family was developed in response to an industry need for a portable high-resolution TDR instrument optimized for cable and wire testing. The CT100 TDR is in use by multiple U.S. national labs, numerous aerospace and defense technology companies, and has been selected by the U.S. Navy for its General Purpose Electronic Test Equipment (GPETE) program. The CT100 is used to support a variety of Navy and Marine Corps applications, replacing the functionality of the discontinued Tektronix(R) 1502B/C high-resolution TDR.

In the late 1990's, the CEO of a major Washington State fruit-packing cooperative contacted Mohr and Associates about the need for an accurate, repeatable way of measuring fruit maturity to improve industry-wide fruit quality and competitiveness with emerging foreign agricultural markets. This led to the development of the Mohr Digi-Test (MDT) line of fruit penetrometers and texture analyzers, the first and only instruments to accurately characterize the internal structural maturity of apples and other tree fruit. The incorporation of this technology into the barcode-driven relational database model designed into the MDT Server software stands to revolutionize QA/QC within the tree fruit industry. The MDT-1 is in use by both industry and academia. The MDT-2 is an enhanced version of the instrument family due for release in Spring 2010.

During the early 1990's, Mohr and Associates began to gather talented nuclear engineering, criticality safety, and health physics experts from the Hanford area and developed a successful nuclear criticality safety consulting business. This team has been involved at a fundamental level in the design of multiple nuclear waste remediation facilities and has branched out into the design and development of specialized nuclear instrumentation for the assay of radiological waste and nuclear fissile contraband materials.

Our home office is in Richland, WA, a town near the famous Hanford reservation that was one of the original boomtowns of the Manhattan Project of WWII. Richland has extensive local scientific and engineering resources, including the Hanford nuclear reservation, dozens of related companies, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory(PNNL). Richland is also situated along the Columbia River, near hundreds of thousands of acres of tree fruit orchards driven by the plentiful irrigation.