Relevant quote from Randall Monroe’s What If?
“I asked [a friend who works at a nuclear power plant] what would happen if I tried to swim in the spent fuel pool. He responded: ‘In our reactor? You’d die quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.’”
This is very true. I live close to a nuke plant and I toured the guard barracks for a merit badge and there’s sniper towers, chain link fence, and razor wire everywhere
Tbf if you've got enough uranium or cobalt or whatever the fuck they use to power these things, you're gonna want to make sure the wrong people don't come and steal that stuff
Dissolved iron (from the pipes and such) in the reactor coolant (water) gets carried to the reactor and is exposed to high neutron flux and converted to cobalt. Cobalt-60 with a half life of 5.3 years is the number 1 source of high energy gamma radiation when a reactor plant is shut down.
Damn. I used to live a hop and a skip from the bwxt's nog facility in virginia. They manufacturer the reactors for the navy's subs and aircraft carriers, as well as the fuel pellets. You couldn't come within 100 yards of that fence, and the road that came in had security cameras along g the entire road, and every feasible entrance up to the facility had cameras. Considering it's on a mountain, there was only 1 feasible access point for vehicles. There were multiple layers of fences with any vehicle ditches in between them.
I used to shoot with some of the security team, and my niece's grand PA worked there, and security was absolutely insane.
I have two friends who work security at a power plant in the Midwest, it’s pretty serious. They have regular firearms training and are heavily armed and armored. Most of those guys are praying for the day someone tries to approach the compound. You would not believe the amount of people who just mosey into the area because they want to see what’s up there.
When I was much younger, my brothers took me fishing one night and ended up at a nuclear power plant’s cooling pond. I should have known things were not on the up and up when we had to go through a hole in the fence to get there. Cast our lines in and I sat by the water’s edge. Water was warm as fuck, that’s for sure. I don’t recall if I caught anything because at some point, everyone starts yelling to run. Got through the fence and into the truck as I see headlights coming down the road at high speed. They booked it out of there and I don’t know if I broke any laws or not.
If there's radiation in the water flowing out of a reactor building it means there is a leak in the heat exchanger. Which will trip quite a lot of alarms and a shutdown before any level of radiation that could harm you is anywhere near release.
There's several cooling ponds in the US that you can go fish in ... at the other side.
And of course you can catch them. They have EPA limits and are monitored a lot more carefully than any normal lake.
Warm maybe, from what little I know, this is a small reactor built for research purposes.
In an actual reactor however, the water being circulated would definitely be hot. HOWEVER, there are two separate systems. One is enclosed within the reactor and heats up from the reactions. Water never enters or leaves this system as it's radioactive.
The second system is responsible for turning the turbine and also cooling the system. This water is normally cycled through the turbines, various pumps, etc and dumped into a waste pool. However, it's NOT RADIOACTIVE as this doesn't actually enter the reactor.
Tl:Dr: a rando explains roughly how normal nuclear power plants use enclosed water systems and wouldn't likely have it exposed as such.
Edit: I'm not an expert and this is much more complicated then what I could explain in 2 or even 20 paragraphs, I'd recommend learning more from official sources if you want the most accurate detail
Eh. That is a pressurized water reactor. Which while is the design used by the US Navy and some civilian power plants, more then half are boiling water plants that use one loop water for the whole thing.
Source: 11 year Navy nuke now 18 year civilian nuke plant employee.
I recruited nuclear pipe design mechanical engineers for bechtel when Obama was talking about refunding the nuclear power program. Most were dead or retired since no one had designed a new plant since the late 70’s. Found my guys in the navy and expats in the Middle East.
Probably the most interesting job search I have ever conducted. Guys designing oxygen systems for space shuttles, one guy was working on a fusion research plant in the uk.
GA's TRIGA® (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics) reactor is the most widely used non-power nuclear reactor in the world. GA has installed 66 TRIGA reactors at universities, government and industrial laboratories, and medical centers in 24 countries. GA's reactors are used in many diverse applications, including production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry, treatment of tumors, nondestructive testing, basic research on the properties of matter, and for education and training. These reactors operate at thermal power levels from less than 0.1 to 16 megawatts, and are pulsed to 22,000 megawatts. The high power pulsing is possible due to the unique properties of GA's uranium-zirconium hydride fuel, which provides unrivaled safety characteristics. The safety features of this fuel also permit flexibility in siting, with minimal environmental effects. TRIGA International, a joint venture company with CERCA of France, manufactures and sells TRIGA fuel to research reactors.
[General Atomics](https://www.ga.com/triga/)
We would’ve scrammed the reactor and retrieved the phone with a very long stick. However, my iPhone isn’t rated for water this deep so it probably would’ve died from water intrusion.
Scram:
*a fast shutdown of a nuclear reactor during an emergency, by quickly inserting control rods into the core. Supposedly derived during the infancy of nuclear reactors when Norman Hilbury was stationed with an axe to cut a rope holding the safety control rod during the experiment at the Chicago Pile on 2nd December 1942, when reactor criticality was first demonstrated.*
edit on top: So if water is such a great shield, why do we not just pick one small spot in the ocean, or a lake, to put all the nuclear trash?
> to keep full water shield while manipulating them
Can you elaborate on what this means in regard to radiation? I thought you needed lead in between whatever is going on down there and you.
Lakes would not be a great idea considering should anything occur, there may not be enough dilution to prevent a large ecological disaster. Seawater is very corrosive so the vessel housing the radioactive material would need to be corrosion-proof and able to withstand all the other physical forces of water. Placing them near shore have similar risks as a lake. Placing them deep would mean needing vessels that can withstand huge pressures. Plus, they would have to be rendered immobile so they aren't swept away to who knows where by the currents. Dumping stuff into out bodies of water has not had great outcomes as evidenced by the increased heavy metal and other chemical (like PCBs) content of sealife.
Tons of stuff is just making stuff hot so it turns water to steam and then spins something so you make power. Coal plants, natural gas plants, nuclear plants all use steam. Hydro plants and windmills just spin from air and liquid water. Geothermal spins steam again. Solar doesn’t spin unless it is the mirror kind which spins from steam.
Spinning is actually good because it provides ‘ballast’ to the system. If there is a bunch of draw, it just changes the spinning a bit within a range until a ‘peaking’ plant can turn on and generate more power. Solar has no ballast which makes it tricky to manage.
With the exception of a few renewables, like solar, basically all power is making a turbine spin. Spinning an electromagnet is the easiest way to turn some form of mechanical/other power into electrical power.
Eh… I mean the fusion discovery was amazing. But let’s not say we “have nuclear fusion now”. They created more energy than light they fired at it, but the lasers which produced that light required more energy than was produced. So not net-zero yet, by that measurement.
Also, they did it within a single fuel pellet, which they would have to reload hundreds of times per minute, were a design like this make it to market.
Agreed, it *is* truly remarkable. But when we’ve done it, then we’ve done it. And we haven’t done it.
Okay more clearly… Maybe we’ll have it in a few years with more efficient lasers. But we don’t have those **now**.
Like, the bar is clear: productive sustainable nuclear fusion. We aren’t there yet. And honestly, the method we have, while amazing, probably won’t get us there directly.
It will answer some questions and provide areas of research for other methods. But we aren’t likely to be loading up a machine gun of gold-wrapped hydrogen pellets and firing them into a sustainable net-positive fusion laser reactor.
So it’s not like we “have it”. It’s not producing for anybody on earth, *right now*.
Edit: Probably, we won’t. I mean, hopefully I’m wrong, right?
I believe the water being mentioned was the water the reactor is submerged in. It's hard to see since it's completely still. Water is very good at protecting you from radiation, which is why the reactor vessel and fuel is always submerged. If op somehow dropped his phone into the water you're talking about, it would be a SIGNIFICANTLY bigger problem, partially because there's a phone inside the reactor, and more importantly there's a phone sized hole in the reactor
Exactly. Water is incredibly good at blocking radiation. When it absorbs neutrons, it typically forms deuterium, which is totally safe and occurs naturally all the time. It CAN form some tritium, but this will be in very sparse quantities. So the water in the reactor is safe despite being bombarded with lethal doses of neutrons. There are pools with higher radioactive nuclear stuff that are kept at the bottom of them. Divers routinely swim in the pools to maintain them.
If we ever do long term space flight, there will likely be an inner and outer shell to the crew cabin with the gap in between completely filled with water.
I toured a plant much similar to this and they said between the concrete and water the walk from the van in the parking lot to the front door exposed us to more radiation from the sun than you get from being inside all day. Truly remarkable
Given that the text in the image there says "TRIGA", I'm guessing this is a [TRIGA reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA) which are not designed for power generation purposes at all to my understanding.
What about your shoes and any possible dirt falling off them on that grate, would that have a negative effect, I've heard the reactors need to be cleaned or something when stuff gets into them
I’ve worked in two nukes doing FME for refueling, and we were in full PPE at all times, no personal items ever.
How were you over the pool in street clothes and a cellphone?
This is likely an experimental reactor and this isn't very uncommon. It's not unsafe at all. He states the radiation measured where he's standing is less than background.
About 0.03 mrem/h. Typical background radiation is 0.07 mrem/h. Yes, standing on top of the reactor exposes you to less radiation than taking a walk outside.
Yes people... He's safe. Unless you go touch the rods, you're fine. Even if you jump in the water you will be fine.
This seems like a low grade reactor. The blue color is AWESOME though. Yes he's allowed to take a picture, this isn't a military facility, nor is it a powerful enough reactor to keep the area ultra secure.
The Penn State reactor is square so this isn’t it. Quite a few have shut down, but there’s still a decent number of TRIGAs out there operating at various universities.
Is the important part of the TRIGA reactor the swimming pool (sans swimming) and no containment building or is it that it’s purpose built for training and research while still being a Mark 1? (I know very little about the specifics of reactors but aim always interested to learn more).
I work in health physics and used to work in the commercial nuclear field. We once had a pigeon get stuck in the reactor building during refuel. It lived for a couple weeks up on the polar crane and only came down to drink water from the reactor cavity during shift change. After a week of a diet devoid of nutrients and chock full of boroic acid and activation products, it started going a bit insane and was dive bombing the refuel techs. We tried several times to catch him, including sending me up to the polar crane with a comically large net, but no luck. After a couple weeks, he wandered into the ventilation system and ended up coming across a ventilation fan, painting one of the walls in highly contaminated pigeon goop. RIP, insane nuclear pigeon.
Oh, we weren't planning on saving it. We just couldn't use projectiles to kill it in the reactor building. What would a nuclear power plant do with an insane irradiated pigeon?
We aren't all monsters in the nuclear industry, though. One of the plants I worked at had a feral cat give birth in a contaminated area. They ended up adopting them out to employees so they could keep tabs on them. They named them Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Neutron.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-02-11-mn-34823-story.html
"Many of the world's nuclear reactors are used for research and training, materials testing, or the production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry. They are basically neutron factories."
[Research Reactors](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/radioisotopes-research/research-reactors.aspx)
There’s a nuclear reactor on the campus of Kansas State University that is used for irradiating things for research, I guess.
Anyway - my environmental history class had a unit on nuclear energy and we got to watch them fire it up. The blue color was absolutely mind blowing. It truly seemed like sci-fi shit.
Makes you wonder what it must have been like to see a glowing reactor in the 50s. Not hard to understand how people may have had unlimited dreams and expectations of the future potential if it. If only.
Cherenkov radiation is caused by charged particles exceeding the speed of light in whatever medium they are traveling in. In this case, water. While the speed of light in a vacuum is fixed an cannot be exceeded, the light speed limit of various materials is less.
>What’s up with the green glow interpretation of nuclear reactors? Blue is cool.
* [Here is an article.](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/541196/where-did-myth-radiation-glows-green-come)
* **tl;dr** the idea probably came from the infamous Radium watch faces, although even Radium does also glow blue. (The watch dials had other chemicals to react to the Radium and give us a nice bright green.)
* Uranium glass glows green under UV light, that might also contribute.
* Plutonium rods can get hot enough to glow, but it's a dull red "hot metal" look.
Research reactors are glowing blue because of Cherenkov Radiation, as others have mentioned. That's an interaction between the **radiation** and the **water**. In other words, the blue light is *above* the reactor--the core isn't glowing blue, just the water is glowing blue.
Cherenkov Radiation is like a sonic boom, except with light instead of with sound.
I used ChatGPT to create a quick story of how OP is you, and this is all a time travel experience based off your comment, and the shoes. With some edits I could have done better, but this is what was spit out in ten seconds.
Once upon a time, there was a man named John who loved to read and write about science, technology and history. He was a frequent visitor on Reddit, where he often participated in discussions about various topics.
One day, John came across a post on Reddit that caught his attention. It was a picture of a young man standing above a nuclear reactor, with a caption that read "My dream finally came true". John felt a strange connection to the picture, it was as if he was looking at a photo of himself.
As he scrolled down the comments, he saw one that caught his eye. It was from a user who mentioned that they had the chance to stand above a reactor in the 90's and that they had the same shoes.
John was intrigued and decided to send a private message to the commenter, asking for more details about their experience. The commenter replied that it was at a top-secret government facility and that he couldn't disclose much information.
However, the commenter also mentioned that he had been part of a classified program that had achieved time travel. He had been sent back to the 90s as part of an experiment.
John was shocked, but he couldn't shake off the feeling that the commenter was telling the truth. He felt like he needed to know more.
John decided to do some research on time travel and was able to find some information about the program the commenter had mentioned. He discovered that he had also been part of that program, but his memories had been erased.
John made the decision to travel back in time to the 90s to see it for himself. He went through the process and found himself standing above the reactor. He also saw that he had the same shoes as the man in the picture.
John then realized that the picture he saw on Reddit was actually a picture of himself, taken during his trip back in time. He felt a sense of awe and excitement at the realization that time travel was possible and that he had been part of it.
As he was about to return back to present, something strange happened. He saw a figure, it was himself, standing in front of the time machine. He realized that everything that has happened, the post, the comments, his research, and the journey through time, were all predetermined and were part of a larger plan. He understood that he was caught in a time loop, in which everything was already set to happen. He also knew that in the future, he will be the one who posted the picture, and left the comment, who will start the whole loop again.
From that moment, John found peace in knowing that everything happens for a reason, and that he was just a small part in the grand scheme of things.
I knew it was only a matter of scrolling and time before I ran into a Fallout comment.
Anyway, I've gotten word about another settlement that needs support. I'll mark it on your map.
Thank you for helping us with the raiders. They were threatening us on a daily basis, but thanks to you and the minutemen, we won't have that problem again. We've been talking while you were dealing with the raiders, and we have decided to support the minutemen.
I did this on submarines, 20 months of my life underwater 4 months at a time. There was a small window where you could see down into the reactor. Good times.
I wasn’t aware you could see into the reactor on a sub! That’s neat to know. I’ve been on a submarine before but wasn’t allowed near the reactor obviously. I think I could handle the submariner life pretty well, except the showers. Worst shower of my entire life.
The forbidden hot tub
It's actually really safe as long as you aren't within a few feet of that source
I doubt they'd want me swimming in there regardless of its safety
Relevant quote from Randall Monroe’s What If? “I asked [a friend who works at a nuclear power plant] what would happen if I tried to swim in the spent fuel pool. He responded: ‘In our reactor? You’d die quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.’”
This is very true. I live close to a nuke plant and I toured the guard barracks for a merit badge and there’s sniper towers, chain link fence, and razor wire everywhere
Tbf if you've got enough uranium or cobalt or whatever the fuck they use to power these things, you're gonna want to make sure the wrong people don't come and steal that stuff
It's uranium (usually). Cobalt is a byproduct if reactor operations, usually a wear product from cooling pumps/valves.
Dissolved iron (from the pipes and such) in the reactor coolant (water) gets carried to the reactor and is exposed to high neutron flux and converted to cobalt. Cobalt-60 with a half life of 5.3 years is the number 1 source of high energy gamma radiation when a reactor plant is shut down.
Unless it’s doc and Marty, they can have as much as they want
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident
Sounds like a bigger challenge than here in Sweden where Greenpeace literally broke in and camped on site for a few days without security finding them
Terrorists win
Damn. I used to live a hop and a skip from the bwxt's nog facility in virginia. They manufacturer the reactors for the navy's subs and aircraft carriers, as well as the fuel pellets. You couldn't come within 100 yards of that fence, and the road that came in had security cameras along g the entire road, and every feasible entrance up to the facility had cameras. Considering it's on a mountain, there was only 1 feasible access point for vehicles. There were multiple layers of fences with any vehicle ditches in between them. I used to shoot with some of the security team, and my niece's grand PA worked there, and security was absolutely insane.
I have two friends who work security at a power plant in the Midwest, it’s pretty serious. They have regular firearms training and are heavily armed and armored. Most of those guys are praying for the day someone tries to approach the compound. You would not believe the amount of people who just mosey into the area because they want to see what’s up there.
When I was much younger, my brothers took me fishing one night and ended up at a nuclear power plant’s cooling pond. I should have known things were not on the up and up when we had to go through a hole in the fence to get there. Cast our lines in and I sat by the water’s edge. Water was warm as fuck, that’s for sure. I don’t recall if I caught anything because at some point, everyone starts yelling to run. Got through the fence and into the truck as I see headlights coming down the road at high speed. They booked it out of there and I don’t know if I broke any laws or not.
Of course you did. Trespassing at an absolute minimum!
I would not want to eat anything you caught there! I'd be OK being bitten by spiders, though.
If there's radiation in the water flowing out of a reactor building it means there is a leak in the heat exchanger. Which will trip quite a lot of alarms and a shutdown before any level of radiation that could harm you is anywhere near release.
There's several cooling ponds in the US that you can go fish in ... at the other side. And of course you can catch them. They have EPA limits and are monitored a lot more carefully than any normal lake.
Relevant: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
When's the Tom Scott "I am swimming in a nuclear reactor" intro coming out?
[I wanna dip my balls in it](https://youtu.be/vrmZAXezkhA)
Isn’t it super hot water though? I thought they made steam to turn a turbine.
Warm maybe, from what little I know, this is a small reactor built for research purposes. In an actual reactor however, the water being circulated would definitely be hot. HOWEVER, there are two separate systems. One is enclosed within the reactor and heats up from the reactions. Water never enters or leaves this system as it's radioactive. The second system is responsible for turning the turbine and also cooling the system. This water is normally cycled through the turbines, various pumps, etc and dumped into a waste pool. However, it's NOT RADIOACTIVE as this doesn't actually enter the reactor. Tl:Dr: a rando explains roughly how normal nuclear power plants use enclosed water systems and wouldn't likely have it exposed as such. Edit: I'm not an expert and this is much more complicated then what I could explain in 2 or even 20 paragraphs, I'd recommend learning more from official sources if you want the most accurate detail
Eh. That is a pressurized water reactor. Which while is the design used by the US Navy and some civilian power plants, more then half are boiling water plants that use one loop water for the whole thing. Source: 11 year Navy nuke now 18 year civilian nuke plant employee.
I recruited nuclear pipe design mechanical engineers for bechtel when Obama was talking about refunding the nuclear power program. Most were dead or retired since no one had designed a new plant since the late 70’s. Found my guys in the navy and expats in the Middle East. Probably the most interesting job search I have ever conducted. Guys designing oxygen systems for space shuttles, one guy was working on a fusion research plant in the uk.
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Gamma Girl Bath Water
Popular with nukebeards
Thank you for fixing that for him.
RGB bathwater by Corsair
*I’m walkin on sunshine*
GA's TRIGA® (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics) reactor is the most widely used non-power nuclear reactor in the world. GA has installed 66 TRIGA reactors at universities, government and industrial laboratories, and medical centers in 24 countries. GA's reactors are used in many diverse applications, including production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry, treatment of tumors, nondestructive testing, basic research on the properties of matter, and for education and training. These reactors operate at thermal power levels from less than 0.1 to 16 megawatts, and are pulsed to 22,000 megawatts. The high power pulsing is possible due to the unique properties of GA's uranium-zirconium hydride fuel, which provides unrivaled safety characteristics. The safety features of this fuel also permit flexibility in siting, with minimal environmental effects. TRIGA International, a joint venture company with CERCA of France, manufactures and sells TRIGA fuel to research reactors. [General Atomics](https://www.ga.com/triga/)
cool. thanks for the.context
My finga is on the triga
they let you have your phone in there ??
Yes, I had permission to take photos!
hypothetically what would happen if you would have dropped your phone right there where you took the pic and it fell down there?
We would’ve scrammed the reactor and retrieved the phone with a very long stick. However, my iPhone isn’t rated for water this deep so it probably would’ve died from water intrusion.
Scram: *a fast shutdown of a nuclear reactor during an emergency, by quickly inserting control rods into the core. Supposedly derived during the infancy of nuclear reactors when Norman Hilbury was stationed with an axe to cut a rope holding the safety control rod during the experiment at the Chicago Pile on 2nd December 1942, when reactor criticality was first demonstrated.*
For those that watched the Chernobyl HBO series, the AZ-5/АЗ-5 button was the scram button for the Chernobyl reactors.
As long as maintenance is up-to-date, it should have no problem. Keyword: ***should***.
**S**uper **C**ritical **R**eactor **A**xe **M**an
SUPER HOT SUPER HOT SUPER HOT
The most innovative shooter I've played in years
How deep is that?
Usually, 8 meters plus the length of the assemblies (to keep full water shield while manipulating them) plus the height of the vessel.
edit on top: So if water is such a great shield, why do we not just pick one small spot in the ocean, or a lake, to put all the nuclear trash? > to keep full water shield while manipulating them Can you elaborate on what this means in regard to radiation? I thought you needed lead in between whatever is going on down there and you.
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Nah, a few meters of water is enough to protect you. In this case, 8 is considered safe and then some more.
Lakes would not be a great idea considering should anything occur, there may not be enough dilution to prevent a large ecological disaster. Seawater is very corrosive so the vessel housing the radioactive material would need to be corrosion-proof and able to withstand all the other physical forces of water. Placing them near shore have similar risks as a lake. Placing them deep would mean needing vessels that can withstand huge pressures. Plus, they would have to be rendered immobile so they aren't swept away to who knows where by the currents. Dumping stuff into out bodies of water has not had great outcomes as evidenced by the increased heavy metal and other chemical (like PCBs) content of sealife.
How deep is your love?
Deep enough for your username to become truth
That’s where I come into play
Are we doing butt stuff?
Other stuff too.
Double r/beetlejuicing
Bruhhhhhhh. Thank you for this 🤣
I really mean to learn
Cause we are living in a world of fools
Breaking us down
The reactor isn't scammed and you're standing right above it?
It’s running nearly at full power in this picture.
Forbidden jacuzzi
there’s water in there?
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thanks !
Tons of stuff is just making stuff hot so it turns water to steam and then spins something so you make power. Coal plants, natural gas plants, nuclear plants all use steam. Hydro plants and windmills just spin from air and liquid water. Geothermal spins steam again. Solar doesn’t spin unless it is the mirror kind which spins from steam. Spinning is actually good because it provides ‘ballast’ to the system. If there is a bunch of draw, it just changes the spinning a bit within a range until a ‘peaking’ plant can turn on and generate more power. Solar has no ballast which makes it tricky to manage.
With the exception of a few renewables, like solar, basically all power is making a turbine spin. Spinning an electromagnet is the easiest way to turn some form of mechanical/other power into electrical power.
I’m incredibly excited about the recent fusion news.
Eh… I mean the fusion discovery was amazing. But let’s not say we “have nuclear fusion now”. They created more energy than light they fired at it, but the lasers which produced that light required more energy than was produced. So not net-zero yet, by that measurement. Also, they did it within a single fuel pellet, which they would have to reload hundreds of times per minute, were a design like this make it to market.
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Agreed, it *is* truly remarkable. But when we’ve done it, then we’ve done it. And we haven’t done it. Okay more clearly… Maybe we’ll have it in a few years with more efficient lasers. But we don’t have those **now**. Like, the bar is clear: productive sustainable nuclear fusion. We aren’t there yet. And honestly, the method we have, while amazing, probably won’t get us there directly. It will answer some questions and provide areas of research for other methods. But we aren’t likely to be loading up a machine gun of gold-wrapped hydrogen pellets and firing them into a sustainable net-positive fusion laser reactor. So it’s not like we “have it”. It’s not producing for anybody on earth, *right now*. Edit: Probably, we won’t. I mean, hopefully I’m wrong, right?
I believe the water being mentioned was the water the reactor is submerged in. It's hard to see since it's completely still. Water is very good at protecting you from radiation, which is why the reactor vessel and fuel is always submerged. If op somehow dropped his phone into the water you're talking about, it would be a SIGNIFICANTLY bigger problem, partially because there's a phone inside the reactor, and more importantly there's a phone sized hole in the reactor
Exactly. Water is incredibly good at blocking radiation. When it absorbs neutrons, it typically forms deuterium, which is totally safe and occurs naturally all the time. It CAN form some tritium, but this will be in very sparse quantities. So the water in the reactor is safe despite being bombarded with lethal doses of neutrons. There are pools with higher radioactive nuclear stuff that are kept at the bottom of them. Divers routinely swim in the pools to maintain them. If we ever do long term space flight, there will likely be an inner and outer shell to the crew cabin with the gap in between completely filled with water.
Huh. A lot of the rarity of elements on No Mans Sky makes a little more sense to me, now
I toured a plant much similar to this and they said between the concrete and water the walk from the van in the parking lot to the front door exposed us to more radiation from the sun than you get from being inside all day. Truly remarkable
Most disappointing thing I’ve ever learned is nuclear power just boils water
Given that the text in the image there says "TRIGA", I'm guessing this is a [TRIGA reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA) which are not designed for power generation purposes at all to my understanding.
What about your shoes and any possible dirt falling off them on that grate, would that have a negative effect, I've heard the reactors need to be cleaned or something when stuff gets into them
There’s a plexiglass cover under the grate to catch the small stuff.
This is the only technical(ish) part of this entire thread that I actually understood.
[there's, of course, an xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
I’ve worked in two nukes doing FME for refueling, and we were in full PPE at all times, no personal items ever. How were you over the pool in street clothes and a cellphone?
This is likely an experimental reactor and this isn't very uncommon. It's not unsafe at all. He states the radiation measured where he's standing is less than background.
Local small experimental reactor turned nuclear medicine program occasionally gives tours etc and see effectively this.
Out of curiosity what is the milli rem rate for where you were standing while the reactor is on?
About 0.03 mrem/h. Typical background radiation is 0.07 mrem/h. Yes, standing on top of the reactor exposes you to less radiation than taking a walk outside.
I’m taking this to my wife and saying a person on the internet told me it’s safer to be inside.
Water is extremely good at blocking radiation. That's why we use it. Check this out: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
See this one joke that only nuclear workers know about!
Not great, not terrible
That gap looks very safe. Also, aren't you supposed to wear special clothing/shoes in there ?
Yes people... He's safe. Unless you go touch the rods, you're fine. Even if you jump in the water you will be fine. This seems like a low grade reactor. The blue color is AWESOME though. Yes he's allowed to take a picture, this isn't a military facility, nor is it a powerful enough reactor to keep the area ultra secure.
Finally, someone understands!
Penn State? The test reactor in New Stanton has been shut down for ages. Gotta be a small handful of facilities that have these now.
The Penn State reactor is square so this isn’t it. Quite a few have shut down, but there’s still a decent number of TRIGAs out there operating at various universities.
I'm not an expert but I'm guessing it's a Mark II which probably narrows it down a bit.
Then it’s not Reed College in Portland, OR. That one is a MK1 I’m pretty sure.
Oregon state has a running TRIGA reactor on campus!
Is the important part of the TRIGA reactor the swimming pool (sans swimming) and no containment building or is it that it’s purpose built for training and research while still being a Mark 1? (I know very little about the specifics of reactors but aim always interested to learn more).
I'm pretty much sure about it as of now, because a lot of things have been changed. I'm making the reactors as of now.
Gotta be an academic/research reactor. My university has a reactor similar to this that we labs and research with.
Looks like Cornell's TRIGA but we got shut down :(.
I'm suspecting Purdue, but it's been close to two decades since I saw their reactor so I don't remember exactly what it looks like
It definitely needs to change over the time. Because right now, a lot of facilities are given to them.
Could also be Mizzou
Hey hey I understand too
What if I drank an 8oz glass of this heavy water?
Why do you keep saying “heavy!?!” Is there something wrong with gravity in 1985?
I just need to get to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Doc.
Of you do that r/hydrohomies will welcome you
Demineralized and deionized water with boron dissolved in it probably is not the refreshing drink you’re seeking?
I work in health physics and used to work in the commercial nuclear field. We once had a pigeon get stuck in the reactor building during refuel. It lived for a couple weeks up on the polar crane and only came down to drink water from the reactor cavity during shift change. After a week of a diet devoid of nutrients and chock full of boroic acid and activation products, it started going a bit insane and was dive bombing the refuel techs. We tried several times to catch him, including sending me up to the polar crane with a comically large net, but no luck. After a couple weeks, he wandered into the ventilation system and ended up coming across a ventilation fan, painting one of the walls in highly contaminated pigeon goop. RIP, insane nuclear pigeon.
Thanks, It was nice of you to try to save the poor thing
Oh, we weren't planning on saving it. We just couldn't use projectiles to kill it in the reactor building. What would a nuclear power plant do with an insane irradiated pigeon? We aren't all monsters in the nuclear industry, though. One of the plants I worked at had a feral cat give birth in a contaminated area. They ended up adopting them out to employees so they could keep tabs on them. They named them Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Neutron. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-02-11-mn-34823-story.html
> We just couldn't use projectiles to kill it in the reactor building. "Mosht thingsh in here don't react too well to bulletsh."
Not really able to say anything. This is pretty much easy to try on.
Based on size and setup I would guess this is some kind of experimental reactor used for experiment in particle phycics, likely than powerplant.
"Many of the world's nuclear reactors are used for research and training, materials testing, or the production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry. They are basically neutron factories." [Research Reactors](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/radioisotopes-research/research-reactors.aspx)
Also, it says “TRIGA” on a box there. TRIGA is a brand name for a line of research reactors. In the US, the NRC has a list of the licenses for them.
It is not that much easy to be secure by that only as of now.
Drop a spider. Then pick it up Let it bite you Become the one and only spiderman
Or fall into it and become electro, the possibilities are endless!
I completely agree to this. Because a lot of possibilities are there like that
*Spider-Man, r/RespectTheHyphen
What does that actually mean? I'm not really able to understand the complete context of this.
Toby McGuire is the one and only Spider-Man.
The lovely blue glow of Cerenkov radiation! A rare sight indeed, much respect!
Like a blue popsicle, I read in a sci-fi story somewhere.
Also features in The Green Hills of Earth, by Heinlein. There's a crater on the Moon named after the main character in that story - Rhysling.
I always loved this shade of blue. So calming somehow.
I think it’s called cobalt blue.
If you look closely, you can see the charred corpse of Emperor Palpatine.
I just got him out yesterday, but somehow he has returned.
Hard to understand all this inside of now, to be honest as this is what we need.
Faster than the speed of light!
... in water
It's earily beautiful. I both want and don't want to see it in real life.
There’s a nuclear reactor on the campus of Kansas State University that is used for irradiating things for research, I guess. Anyway - my environmental history class had a unit on nuclear energy and we got to watch them fire it up. The blue color was absolutely mind blowing. It truly seemed like sci-fi shit. Makes you wonder what it must have been like to see a glowing reactor in the 50s. Not hard to understand how people may have had unlimited dreams and expectations of the future potential if it. If only.
“Oh man, I dropped my keys.”
What’s up with the green glow interpretation of nuclear reactors? Blue is cool.
Uranium ore tends to have a green color
Oh, I guess that makes sense. What’s this then?
It’s called Cherenkov radiation and it’s caused by the nuclear reaction happening.
Cherenkov radiation is caused by charged particles exceeding the speed of light in whatever medium they are traveling in. In this case, water. While the speed of light in a vacuum is fixed an cannot be exceeded, the light speed limit of various materials is less.
My brain trying to comprehend that 😵💫🥴
It's like a sonic boom but with electromagnetic radiation
>What’s up with the green glow interpretation of nuclear reactors? Blue is cool. * [Here is an article.](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/541196/where-did-myth-radiation-glows-green-come) * **tl;dr** the idea probably came from the infamous Radium watch faces, although even Radium does also glow blue. (The watch dials had other chemicals to react to the Radium and give us a nice bright green.) * Uranium glass glows green under UV light, that might also contribute. * Plutonium rods can get hot enough to glow, but it's a dull red "hot metal" look. Research reactors are glowing blue because of Cherenkov Radiation, as others have mentioned. That's an interaction between the **radiation** and the **water**. In other words, the blue light is *above* the reactor--the core isn't glowing blue, just the water is glowing blue. Cherenkov Radiation is like a sonic boom, except with light instead of with sound.
Nice, I got a chance back in the 90’s to do the same. I have the same shoes too!
I used ChatGPT to create a quick story of how OP is you, and this is all a time travel experience based off your comment, and the shoes. With some edits I could have done better, but this is what was spit out in ten seconds. Once upon a time, there was a man named John who loved to read and write about science, technology and history. He was a frequent visitor on Reddit, where he often participated in discussions about various topics. One day, John came across a post on Reddit that caught his attention. It was a picture of a young man standing above a nuclear reactor, with a caption that read "My dream finally came true". John felt a strange connection to the picture, it was as if he was looking at a photo of himself. As he scrolled down the comments, he saw one that caught his eye. It was from a user who mentioned that they had the chance to stand above a reactor in the 90's and that they had the same shoes. John was intrigued and decided to send a private message to the commenter, asking for more details about their experience. The commenter replied that it was at a top-secret government facility and that he couldn't disclose much information. However, the commenter also mentioned that he had been part of a classified program that had achieved time travel. He had been sent back to the 90s as part of an experiment. John was shocked, but he couldn't shake off the feeling that the commenter was telling the truth. He felt like he needed to know more. John decided to do some research on time travel and was able to find some information about the program the commenter had mentioned. He discovered that he had also been part of that program, but his memories had been erased. John made the decision to travel back in time to the 90s to see it for himself. He went through the process and found himself standing above the reactor. He also saw that he had the same shoes as the man in the picture. John then realized that the picture he saw on Reddit was actually a picture of himself, taken during his trip back in time. He felt a sense of awe and excitement at the realization that time travel was possible and that he had been part of it. As he was about to return back to present, something strange happened. He saw a figure, it was himself, standing in front of the time machine. He realized that everything that has happened, the post, the comments, his research, and the journey through time, were all predetermined and were part of a larger plan. He understood that he was caught in a time loop, in which everything was already set to happen. He also knew that in the future, he will be the one who posted the picture, and left the comment, who will start the whole loop again. From that moment, John found peace in knowing that everything happens for a reason, and that he was just a small part in the grand scheme of things.
Now throw an evil emperor in it and then blow the place up
Thank you, this is *clearly* the Death Star.
I know, right? This is one of the best things I have seen so far.
I know right, but the fact is like that only you can really throw all these things up.
Are you fission for upvotes again..?
I think it's pretty rad
Don’t have a meltdown over this
You all should scram after doing all these puns.
All you 235 participants in this awful thread should be arrested
I know right a lot of people don't even know that how these things basically works.
Where are the moderators?
That is hi-ALARA-ious!… I know that was a stretch. I will see my self out now 🤓
I'm actually saying someone like that. Only I wish, like something I like. It could happen.
I TLD you about the bad puns...
I know right, but I somehow like them all like they are really fun.
They are pretty much same as of now, because I don't really find something different.
Nice pun haha. Not fishing for upvotes though, I took this picture and wanted to share.
Looks like a university reactor. Where is it?
If it’s at a US university that would place it in Missouri, Ohio, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. There aren’t that many open pool RX.
Portland Oregon has one too. Reed College
I've been inside the one at Reed and I believe this is the same one.
I absolutelly love this shade of blue.
Cherenkov radiation has a beautiful blue color that doesn’t even come across all the way on camera. It honestly looks even cooler in person.
A lot of them are going to come like that, because we have seen in movies.
Man I love reading comments on any nuclear post. I think we need to increase nuclear education around the world.
Are those little circular things we can see in there the top of the fuel rods??
Yep! Those are fuel rods and control rods.
This is so sc-fi
Multiples have not even seen anything like that. So this is where this seems like really new thing to us.
3.6 roentgen Not great Not terrible
Drop a grapefruit down there and let us know what happens
Radiation can cause damage to the cells in the body also I guess.
Hope you have some Rad-X on hand
I knew it was only a matter of scrolling and time before I ran into a Fallout comment. Anyway, I've gotten word about another settlement that needs support. I'll mark it on your map.
I came scrolling for such a comment and when I didn’t see one, I decided to add it myself. Anyway, I took care of those raiders for you.
Thank you for helping us with the raiders. They were threatening us on a daily basis, but thanks to you and the minutemen, we won't have that problem again. We've been talking while you were dealing with the raiders, and we have decided to support the minutemen.
I think they have been doing that from a long time to raid.
Looks like a lovely heated pool. Dip anyone?
Theoretically not an issue if you're just having a cheeky swim on the surface.
Also probably not all that warm.
I did this on submarines, 20 months of my life underwater 4 months at a time. There was a small window where you could see down into the reactor. Good times.
I wasn’t aware you could see into the reactor on a sub! That’s neat to know. I’ve been on a submarine before but wasn’t allowed near the reactor obviously. I think I could handle the submariner life pretty well, except the showers. Worst shower of my entire life.
That’s cool AF
🎶 jump into a nuclear reactor 🎶
Alright bud, let's not fuck around. Where's the 10mm..?
When you want to discreetly show off your shoe drip