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Language: en

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- A nuclear reactor run
by undergraduate students

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at a liberal arts college
sounds like an interesting idea,

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but it's real and it's been here

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at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon for 50 years.

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And, yeah, we're gonna put a camera in it.

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Go for it.

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- The Reed Research
Reactor is a TRIGA reactor,

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it's designed to be operated by students

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and designed to be used
as a training reactor.

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We got it because we had a
radiochemist on Reed's faculty.

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He thought that it'd be really important

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for his students to have access

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to this cutting edge technology
that was nuclear reactors.

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We have a tank that's 25-feet deep.

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It's full of around 25
thousand gallons of water.

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We think we have enough uranium

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to continue operating at our
current rate for 100 years

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without having to change it out.

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We operate at 250 kilowatts,

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which is actually a pretty low power.

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While it does produce
power when it operates,

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there's no way of harnessing
that to make electricity.

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The main purpose of our
reactor is for science.

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- The kind of research we do

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is called Neutron Activation Analysis.

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The logic behind it is
if you don't know exactly

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what something is made out of,

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you can make it radioactive and then find

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exactly what it's made out of.

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Then, work backwards and figure
out what it was originally.

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Then, let it sit in a room until it decays

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and then you have your
original thing back.

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You can put 80 things in there.

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You drop it into a tube
and then you turn it,

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and it turns and it gets

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the same amount of neutron exposure.

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Then, we get it out with a fishing rod.

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Then afterwards, you
have to be very careful

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with it because it's contaminated.

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The water at the bottom of the reactor

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becomes radioactive, it has N16 in it.

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Nitrogen 16 because N16 has
a half-life of seven seconds.

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When the water is cycling through,

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it gets diffused through a nozzle

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which causes the new water
to swirl around like this,

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which makes the delivery time from

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the water at the bottom of the reactor

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to the water at
the top of the reactor

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just a few seconds longer
than it needs to be.

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So, water at the top isn't radioactive.

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That's one of the coolest
parts of our water system.

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- The radiation levels
that the reactor produces

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is actually very low, but the water
provides sufficient shielding.

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So, it's safe for us to be in here

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while the reactor's operating.

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It's a very small reactor.

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It doesn't get hot enough to melt down.
It doesn't explode.

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The way we shut down our
reactor in an emergency

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is with something called a SCRAM.

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We have a special button, it's
labelled the SCRAM button.

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When you press it, it cuts
power to those electromagnets

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and it automatically
shuts the reactor down.

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If someone drops their
phone or some other object

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into the pool, normally what we do is

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we get a bucket on some
string and we try to scrape

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the object into the bucket
with a very long stick.

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Or, we wrap duct tape around heavy weights

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and we lower the weight
into the pool on a string

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and try to pick it up that way.

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We have a pretty good success rate.

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- Can we turn the lights off
so we can see the blue glow?

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Wow, that looks awesome.

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The blue glow is Cherenkov radiation,

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which is a bit like the visual
equivalent of a sonic boom,

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but there are other people

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much better qualified to
explain that than I am.

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Research reactors aren't very common,

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but there are more than you might think.

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There are a couple of dozen
in the United States alone

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at universities and research institutes
and a few companies.

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This one is basically a student society,

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just a student society with
a lot of regulation and oversight.

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- Before you're allowed
to operate the reactor,

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you have to get a licence from
the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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Our students train for an academic year
before they sit down for that exam.

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You have to do things
such as memorise diagrams

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for our cooling system or
our ventilation system.

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You need to be able to
explain how the physics work,

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how to protect yourself from radiation

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and how to actually use the
controls of the reactor.

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We licence 15 students
to operate every year.

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Currently, we have 30 to 40
students on staff.

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- You don't get academic
credit for working the reactor.

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I think part of that
is because we get paid

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to work here because this is a job.

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This is the reason why I came to Reed.

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I just thought it was really cool

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that this was a facility
that existed at a school

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and I was like, "I'm gonna do that."

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When I first started
the training programme,

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I had pull aside the training supervisors

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and say, "You have to
explain the atom to me

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"from the beginning because
I don't know anything."

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I worked really hard and I
just really wanted to know it.

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Now I know it and I still
think it's really cool

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and I get to do cool
things like operate this.

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- Thank you so much to everyone
at the Reed Research Reactor

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and, in particular, Val and Carrie

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who are putting my camera into it.

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Pull down the description for more links

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about Reed College and about the reactor.

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I'm looking at a nuclear reactor.

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Oh, wow.

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I've never actually
seen Cherenkov radiation

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in person before, it's amazing.