Robert P Crease travels to Reed College in the US, which is unique for having the only nuclear reactor in the US run by undergraduate students
Toria Ellis stands over the pool and shuts off the lights. A half-dozen high-school students from a nearby Roman Catholic girls school gape down at the luminous blue glow that suddenly appears at the bottom. The glow reveals an object that looks like a futuristic car tyre, with a pockmarked white hub surrounded by two rings. “That’s the reactor core,” says Ellis. “The glow is called Cherenkov radiation.”
I’ve travelled to Reed College – a small, prestigious and progressive liberal-arts institution in Portland, Oregon, US. Located in an environmentally conscious city, Reed is unique in being the only purely undergraduate institution that has a reactor operated by students. The Reed Research Reactor has been running continuously since 1968 – a fact that the college proudly advertises on its website.
Ellis, a physicist who is the reactor’s operations manager, uses a laser pointer to highlight features for the visitors. “See that matrix of holes in the centre? They’re for the fuel elements.” The dot moves outwards to the inner ring. “That ring’s for samples to be irradiated. The outer ring is the graphite moderator.” Ellis sweeps the laser dot up and down some pipes. “These are for the control rods, those for experimental samples and detectors.”
As the students watch on, Ellis explains that shutting down a reactor is called “scramming”. Ellis says the term dates back to the first reactor built by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in 1942, where the emergency switch-off method consisted of a control rod attached to a rope. Someone stood by ready to chop the rope with an axe if the rod failed: “scram” is supposedly an acronym of “Safety Control Rod Axe Man”.
Ellis then asks Irina, one of the students, to make a chopping gesture with their hands – the Reed reactor’s scram signal. On the other side of a large window is Vee, a 19-year-old Reed maths and physics student who is the operator on duty in the control room. Vee pushes the scram button, and the blue glow disappears. Almost; its haze lingers a few seconds. Ellis then turns the lights back on.
Open for all
The Reed Research Reactor is one of the few “open pool” nuclear reactors in the world, where you can peer down from the edge and see the Cherenkov glow. It’s also the only reactor anywhere, as far as I know, where they let visitors initiate a scram. What’s unusual too is the diversity of the students who operate the reactor.
Virtually all Reed students receive their reactor operator licences before they are legally permitted to drink (21 in Oregon) and many before they have even learned to drive a car. Stephen Frantz, a former head of Reed’s reactor, told me he once attended a conference of research-reactor directors where one lab boss proudly announced that the average age of his operators was just 50. Frantz made his audience’s jaws drop by saying that, at Reed, the average was 20.
Reed’s licensed reactor operators are also unique in that men are a minority. On my visit, Reed students boasted that their reactor operators include more women, and more gender non-conforming people, than at all other research reactors in the US combined. Thanks to Reed’s reactor operators, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) no longer questions anyone who wants to change their names from one gender to another on their licences.
The reactor currently has 34 student operators, plus Ellis and current reactor director Jerry Newhouse. But the operators aren’t just those taking science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) subjects: about half are studying non-STEM subjects entirely. On my visit, I met operators majoring in economics, philosophy and studio art. Newhouse himself has a bachelor’s in history.
Some students come to Reed specifically because they want to be reactor operators. Others learn about the opportunity only after starting their studies or by word of mouth. It’s not a shoo-in though. Prospective operators have to take a year-long licensing class and pass a rigorous test administered by the NRC, which oversees the reactor as strictly as it does any other.
They get paid for their services, too. It’s not much – they earn only a bit more than minimum wage – but being a reactor operator is certainly the coolest job on the Reed campus. A common thread of all the operators I encounter is that they are hooked by the blue glow. “It never gets old,” one tells me.
TRIGA happy
Reed was founded in 1908, and its brick, Tudor-gothic, ivy-covered buildings, surrounded by lawns on one side and a nature reserve and wooded canyon on the other, were modelled on St John’s College, Oxford. The reactor, though, is in a nondescript, single-storey concrete-and-brick garage-like structure next to the psychology building and opposite the chemistry lab. One room houses the pool/reactor, visible from the control room on the other side of a large window. Nearby is a classroom and a radiochemistry lab.
Building the reactor involved a serious trade-off. But Arthur Scott insisted that it was essential to a liberal-arts education
The idea that the college should build its own reactor came from Reed chemist Arthur Scott in the early 1960s (J. Chem. Ed. 47 612). His plan was resisted by some staff, who felt the resources of the college – which still does not have an engineering department – were better spent on developing a degree in ethnic studies and supporting students of colour. Building the reactor involved a serious trade-off. But Scott insisted that reactor education was essential to a liberal-arts education. Reed’s trustees approved, and the reactor opened in 1968 at a cost of $321,000.
In terms of spec, it is a non-power “TRIGA” research reactor, designed and manufactured shortly after the Second World War by General Atomics. The core, which sits under 95,000 litres of cooling water, contains about 80 fuel elements in a circular grid array. The elements are made of zirconium hydride and uranium hydride, with the 20% enriched uranium-235 making up 8% of the mass of each element.
According to simple nuclear physics, neutrons of a certain velocity cause uranium-235 nuclei to split into pieces and release more neutrons. The outer, graphite ring that Ellis had pointed out reflects the neutrons back towards the core and slows or “moderates” them sufficiently to cause more uranium-235 nuclei to split, producing more neutrons. And so it goes.
By the standards of national lab facilities, the Reed reactor is a toy. Its 250 kW power is a tiny fraction of what’s found at, say, the Institut Laue–Langevin in France or the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US (60 and 85 MW, respectively). It’s also next to insignificant compared with commercial power reactors that supply electricity to national grids, some of which have outputs of over 1000 MW.
But the Reed reactor is used for real experiments. The ring inside the reflector is a rotating “lazy susan” holder that allows samples – metals, seeds, other materials – to be irradiated. There’s also a thimble – basically a pipe about 8 m long and 3 cm wide – leading into the core, allowing samples to be left for long exposures.
Then there’s the “rabbit” – a pneumatic device for short exposures, which shoots samples in and out of the core to a radiochemistry lab just behind the control room. Reed students are currently developing the thimble pipe to eventually allow a neutron beam to pass through to create another experimental facility at the bridge over the pool.
Portland’s high school, college and university students, as well as some local businesses and agencies, use the reactor for activation analysis. This involves putting water, soil or plant samples into one of the experimental facilities and exposing them to neutrons. Doing so “activates” – creates radioactive isotopes in – some of the samples, and the half-lives of the resulting isotopes help identify the materials.
Activation analysis has many uses, including testing for contaminants and identifying where the material in a sample is from. One Reed student’s project involved activating pottery shards and soil samples taken from the Silk Road in Western China to determine where the pottery was made. Another student got into forensics by irradiating fingernail clippings to see if you can tell which finger a wedding ring was on from the traces of gold in the clippings. (You can.)
One Portland dentist even sent in the material used to fill teeth, curious to know if its content was as billed. When the sample emerged from the pneumatic tube, it set off all the radiation monitors in the radiochemistry lab, alarming the students. Turns out the sample was largely silver, which is highly activating. The activated silver wasn’t hazardous, containing two isotopes with half-lives of 25s and 144s. Still, I’ll exercise greater caution the next time I put my teeth inside a reactor core.
Youngsters and pranksters
Reed College fully supports the reactor, meaning that it does not have to depend on outside funding. Reactor operators do sometimes conduct work for private labs – not for money, but in exchange for providing research opportunities for other students. They have, however, refused projects from companies involved in fracking, and the week before my visit, they turned down a military-defence contractor.
I find the atmosphere at the reactor to be industrious and serious, as you’d expect from a lab, but mixed with the playfulness and liveliness of college students. One wall of the control room has an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themed mural painted by a former art-student operator. It depicts a picnic, dotted with reactor imagery: cheese slices arrayed as a radiation symbol, a stopwatch indicating counts per minute rather than time, and plastic plates coloured uranium-glaze orange.
A big sign in another room outlines safety procedures, and scrawled underneath is the advice: “You look cooler wearing a lab coat anyway.” The reactor’s logo is a griffin – Reed’s mascot – emblazoned over the image of a Bohr atom. For many years operators placed rubber ducks in the reactor’s pool, allowing them to eyeball the water flow; if the ducks were swimming around it meant that the water was circulating. Sadly, one year a new NRC inspector said the ducks had to go. “He was probably right,” Frantz admits. “I should have filled out a 50.59 [an NRC form].”
Another time a student crafted a mock certificate with the official NRC logo and signatures declaring Reed’s facility “The funnest reactor in the US” and hung the certificate on the wall. It had to be removed after the next NRC inspection. “Learning limits is part of student education,” Newhouse reminds me.
School for scandal
It’s not been entirely plain sailing for the Reed Reactor, especially as the state of Oregon has long resisted reactors. The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, the state’s only commercial nuclear-power facility, started operation in 1975 and closed in 1992 after some technical issues, and vigorous and ongoing anti-nuclear protests and lawsuits. Yet Reed’s reactor has remained curiously uncontroversial, despite occasional breathless coverage in the local media of minor safety events.
In November 1991, for instance, the reactor was irradiating samples for three projects: a high-school project looking for traces of selenium in sediment; a Master’s thesis at a nearby university looking at geological samples in Oregon’s hot springs; and a PhD project testing air-filter samples. A small amount of gaseous fission products was released, triggering alarms on facility radiation monitors.
The reactor was shut down, but the reason for the release could not be determined. Even after the NRC let the reactor restart a few weeks later, hoping to locate the cause, it could not be found. The agency then allowed the reactor to return to normal operation – and the release never reappeared. The NRC formally labelled the episode an “unusual event.”
Despite being the go-to person for journalists seeking an angry quote, the only danger Lloyd Marbet could point to was the longevity of the Reed reactor
When local TV networks reported the incident, reporters scoured the campus and the surrounding neighbourhood seeking someone – anyone – who was truly concerned. One station contacted Lloyd Marbet, a vehement anti-nuclear activist and a central figure in the campaign to close the Trojan reactor. Despite being the go-to person for journalists seeking an angry quote, the only danger he could point to was the longevity of the Reed reactor. “All components age over time,” he warned, darkly. In fact, the reactor will probably outlive the building.
Upon being told what had happened, Reed students responded by designing and making T-shirts bearing the slogan “UNUSUAL EVENT”. (I tried to find one, but couldn’t trace anyone who keeps three-decade-old T-shirts.) “That probably sums up the cultural place of the reactor on campus,” one student tells me. A 1991 editorial about the event in The Oregonian, the state’s major newspaper, simply announced: “Reed passes the test”.
Later, in 2005, ABC’s Primetime news-magazine show sent a team of journalism graduate students around the US to report on how easy it was “to infiltrate nuclear reactors on college campuses…filled with just the kind of radioactive materials that terrorists want”. When members of the team got to what ABC called “the laid-back campus of Reed College”, they apparently could not find the reactor (who’d have thought it was behind the psychology building?) but did turn up a damning fact: Reed does not have a nuclear engineering department, or even any engineering department.
Scandalized, ABC’s national chief investigative correspondent Brian Roth dropped this bombshell finding on an unsuspecting NRC representative, demanding to know why they allowed a reactor at such a place. “What’s the useful purpose [of a reactor] at Reed?” Roth demanded, in a tone that implied it was like giving dynamite to children.
More than two decades on from the ABC report, I ask operators what they’ve learned from the reactor. “Problem-solving and communication,” says Vee, the maths-physics major who was on duty during the high-school tour I observed. “Of two kinds, scientific and social. You have to figure out how to handle and talk to different sets of people who are sometimes uncooperative on tours. You have to handle questions about meltdowns and terrorism.”
Auden, 19, another operator, says the reactor engenders confidence and good time-management. “The first times you operate you think, ‘Oh my god I’m operating a nuclear reactor!’ but the anxieties wear off and there’s continuous learning,” Auden says. “Also, you are responsible and there’s a lot of things to manage inside and outside the reactor. Time’s a valuable but limited resource. You have to be able to say ‘No’ to things. Set work–life boundaries.”
“Teamwork and trouble-shooting,” adds Meng-Wei, 21, a physics student working on the theory of open quantum systems. “It’s a big team with people of different skills where there may be a level of danger. You have to trust co-workers. You have to be able to challenge someone about safety – even your supervisor – if you feel uncomfortable, and also learn to be challenged.”
Meng-Wei also credits the reactor with helping her to react coolly to mistakes and surprises, and cope with anger and stress. “This is not the sort of thing you learn in an undergraduate class, or even a lab setting,” she says. When Meng-Wei applied last summer for an internship at Fermilab doing dark-matter research, the first thing the interviewer said was “You’re the one who worked at a reactor!” She got the job.
As for Johnny, a 22-year-old philosophy student interested in sustainability and global warming, the reactor is all about “negotiating idealism and practicality”. Johnny tells me that while nuclear-reactor training may not be directly philosophical, it has given him practical experience in making trade-offs between the ideal and the real.
“It’s the kind of choices we have to make to cope with global warming,” he says. “It also gives me a first-hand account of what working in nuclear technology is like.” Johnny’s experience puts him in a position to speak to others about the rigour, precision, care and importance of science, and of nuclear technology.
The critical point
Reed is a utopian bubble. Its reactor is a protected scientific facility in a place where nuclear fear is banished, science education is integrated with the humanities, and students operate a reactor while also reading Homer and Kant, performing Shakespeare and Brecht, and studying race and gender issues. Any pressure to close the reactor would not come from politicians or anti-nuclear activists but would have to come from Reed’s board of trustees.
One factor that makes this possible is that the reactor is small and harmless. I hear Reed students say that it has no more power than a washing machine and generates just enough heat to scramble eggs. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much; while the reactor core is about the size of a large washing machine, it produces about 10 times the heat of a home heating furnace. “They gave it to us because they know we can’t do anything bad with it,” says Ellis.
Another reason for the reactor’s success is that Reed encourages creative thinking, and integrates the reactor into the campus curriculum and culture. Those who operate it must learn a wide range of physics, work in interdisciplinary teams on a complex device, participate in a scientific project, and become familiar with the values of a scientific community. After the 1991 incident, Reed’s president briefly considered closing the reactor, but his office was promptly swamped by students of all majors who said that it had changed their lives.
A glassy solution to nuclear waste
Reed has an open campus. Its gracious large front lawn is an uninterrupted community space where both students and neighbours walk dogs, play on tennis courts and then wander through the trails in the gorge, where they can see Portland’s only fish ladder for salmon to swim upstream. The reactor itself does not look intimidating – there’s no menacing cooling tower belching steam – but is a pool inside a one-storey building.
Reed is fully transparent about the reactor, which is a great asset in a reputable institution. The college gives about 100 tours a year. Visitors are taken to the edge of the pool – whose water is 10,000 times purer than drinking water – and see the core and the unforgettable blue glow. That glow should be a universal part of undergraduate education. If anything’s scandalous about Reed’s reactor, it’s that more liberal-arts colleges and universities don’t have one.
