- A nuclear reactor run by undergraduate students
at a liberal arts college sounds like an interesting idea,
but it's real and it's been here
at Reed College in Portland, Oregon for 50 years.
And, yeah, we're gonna put a camera in it.
Go for it.
- The Reed Research Reactor is a TRIGA reactor,
it's designed to be operated by students
and designed to be used as a training reactor.
We got it because we had a radiochemist on Reed's faculty.
He thought that it'd be really important
for his students to have access
to this cutting edge technology that was nuclear reactors.
We have a tank that's 25-feet deep.
It's full of around 25 thousand gallons of water.
We think we have enough uranium
to continue operating at our current rate for 100 years
without having to change it out.
We operate at 250 kilowatts,
which is actually a pretty low power.
While it does produce power when it operates,
there's no way of harnessing that to make electricity.
The main purpose of our reactor is for science.
- The kind of research we do
is called Neutron Activation Analysis.
The logic behind it is if you don't know exactly
what something is made out of,
you can make it radioactive and then find
exactly what it's made out of.
Then, work backwards and figure out what it was originally.
Then, let it sit in a room until it decays
and then you have your original thing back.
You can put 80 things in there.
You drop it into a tube and then you turn it,
and it turns and it gets
the same amount of neutron exposure.
Then, we get it out with a fishing rod.
Then afterwards, you have to be very careful
with it because it's contaminated.
The water at the bottom of the reactor
becomes radioactive, it has N16 in it.
Nitrogen 16 because N16 has a half-life of seven seconds.
When the water is cycling through,
it gets diffused through a nozzle
which causes the new water to swirl around like this,
which makes the delivery time from
the water at the bottom of the reactor
to the water at the top of the reactor
just a few seconds longer than it needs to be.
So, water at the top isn't radioactive.
That's one of the coolest parts of our water system.
- The radiation levels that the reactor produces
is actually very low, but the water provides sufficient shielding.
So, it's safe for us to be in here
while the reactor's operating.
It's a very small reactor.
It doesn't get hot enough to melt down. It doesn't explode.
The way we shut down our reactor in an emergency
is with something called a SCRAM.
We have a special button, it's labelled the SCRAM button.
When you press it, it cuts power to those electromagnets
and it automatically shuts the reactor down.
If someone drops their phone or some other object
into the pool, normally what we do is
we get a bucket on some string and we try to scrape
the object into the bucket with a very long stick.
Or, we wrap duct tape around heavy weights
and we lower the weight into the pool on a string
and try to pick it up that way.
We have a pretty good success rate.
- Can we turn the lights off so we can see the blue glow?
Wow, that looks awesome.
The blue glow is Cherenkov radiation,
which is a bit like the visual equivalent of a sonic boom,
but there are other people
much better qualified to explain that than I am.
Research reactors aren't very common,
but there are more than you might think.
There are a couple of dozen in the United States alone
at universities and research institutes and a few companies.
This one is basically a student society,
just a student society with a lot of regulation and oversight.
- Before you're allowed to operate the reactor,
you have to get a licence from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Our students train for an academic year before they sit down for that exam.
You have to do things such as memorise diagrams
for our cooling system or our ventilation system.
You need to be able to explain how the physics work,
how to protect yourself from radiation
and how to actually use the controls of the reactor.
We licence 15 students to operate every year.
Currently, we have 30 to 40 students on staff.
- You don't get academic credit for working the reactor.
I think part of that is because we get paid
to work here because this is a job.
This is the reason why I came to Reed.
I just thought it was really cool
that this was a facility that existed at a school
and I was like, "I'm gonna do that."
When I first started the training programme,
I had pull aside the training supervisors
and say, "You have to explain the atom to me
"from the beginning because I don't know anything."
I worked really hard and I just really wanted to know it.
Now I know it and I still think it's really cool
and I get to do cool things like operate this.
- Thank you so much to everyone at the Reed Research Reactor
and, in particular, Val and Carrie
who are putting my camera into it.
Pull down the description for more links
about Reed College and about the reactor.
I'm looking at a nuclear reactor.
Oh, wow.
I've never actually seen Cherenkov radiation
in person before, it's amazing.