Nuclear Engineering – Jake & Eddie’s Excellent Adventure 😎🐶

Neutron Flux

While studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, I enjoyed courses in Thermodynamics. Engineers use many different thermodynamic reactions to power everything from an early steam locomotive to a space shuttle flying in space.

An essential ingredient in thermo is energy, typically in the form of heat. As told elsewhere, I became interested in nuclear fission as an energy source when I discovered a small nuclear reactor on campus.

Nuclear power, it turns out, is all about neutrons. The neutron is big, heavy, and carries no electrical charge (to push other charged particles away). Think of them as bowling balls. An element like Uranium is full of these suckers.

Nuclear fission can happen when an unstable isotope radioactively decays, producing a free neutron. It can, in turn, wack into a Uranium atom and cause a fission event that releases multiple neutrons. You can achieve a chain reaction if enough of these neutrons fly around. This is the Neutron Flux, and I analyzed it for my graduate thesis.

You control the chain reaction by slowing down some neutrons with water or more exotic materials like liquid sodium. All of this nonsense produces energy that can boil water, run an electric generator, and charge your iPhone.

Oh, Noodly One – this was the ticket for me. As complicated as can be. If I could learn all this happy horseshit, I would definitely become a rock star! 🤩

Now for the really cool part. Specific fission reactions allow you to make fuel for the more common nuclear power plant. The Experimental Breeder Reactor – EBR-1 – does just that. It was the first nuclear reactor to produce power and prove you could breed fissile materials.

EBT-1

I first learned of the museum on our trip in 2021. On our way to visit Craters of the Moon, I noticed it, only to subsequently discover it was closed due to COVID. When I saw we were not far away from Arco on our slide south, I contacted them, and they assured me they were open for the summer.

Experimental Breeder Reactor #1 was the first nuclear power plant to produce electricity. It was also built to prove you could use a nuclear reactor to enrich isotopes of Uranium and run other nuclear power plants (or build high-yield atomic weapons). It used an exotic nuclear fuel cycle requiring a primary liquid sodium and potassium mixture coolant. If this stuff gets anywhere near water, it explodes.

Reactor control room. The button on the lower right of the table shuts the reactor down. This is known as SCRAM.

The tour was excellent, taught by a student studying communications at Washington State University. More weird fucking karma, as one of Looney Tunes’ daughters studied the exact same thing there some 15 years ago.

Some very cool stuff here.

The reactor core is on the left. The fuel assembly is on the right. Each component of the blanket contained Uranium 238 and weighed 100 pounds.

You could stand right on top of the reactor with a view into the core.

Bulbs are lit by the generator being turned by the turbine powered by the nuclear reactor.

The first test of the complete power plant lit four light bulbs in 1951. This had never been done before.

Several years later, they were able to power the complete facility.

Lead-lined room with remote manipulator arms. The leaded glass was 39 inches thick. The nuclear materials they were handling would kill in a heartbeat without this shielding.

A hot chamber manipulates the spent fuel to remove the enriched Uranium mechanically. It had a 39-inch thick window comprising 34 layers of leaded glass to protect the user.

I was more than surprised to come across a scale model of the reactor I was involved with during my graduate studies. The LOFT facility was used to simulate the loss of primary coolant. I visited it once during my studies.

Scale model of the LOFT reactor at Idaho Engineering Laboratory. Completely out of place in this museum. More weird karma 😋

This piece of hardware was out of place in the museum, which is probably why it’s located outside the restrooms 🤣. Coincidence? I think not!

Experiments to test the feasibility of a nuclear-powered bomber. Like nuclear-powered submarines, a nuke running it could stay airborne for six months.

Outside the building were two experiments used to study the feasibility of a nuclear-powered aircraft—these two units we used to test that theory. Kennedy ultimately canceled the program. The professor I studied under in graduate school had worked on a nuclear-powered rocket engine in Nevada in the 1960s. In the 1950s, nuclear power was certainly viewed as manna from the gods! There was seemingly nothing it couldn’t do. It also proved to have a stigma that was extremely difficult to shake.

I am glad I could make it back here and tour the museum. When I graduated from Cal Poly, I talked to the Navy about becoming a Navy Nuke. They told me that after basic training, they ship you off to Idaho to learn how to run a nuclear reactor.

Idaho, how odd, I thought. If I only knew…

I returned by lunchtime and spent the afternoon doing long overdue housecleaning on the trailer. The weather was nice, and we enjoyed our respite before starting our final leg of the journey to the Southwest.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Bill, Laura, and I visited some museums in Oak Ridge Tennessee. Oak Ridge is the home of the Clinton Engineer Works, now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Mockup of Little Boy atomic bomb at Oak Ridge National Laboratory K-25 museum.

The uranium used in the ‘Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was made here. The effort was herculean. The world’s largest building (at that time) was built and manned to hold the hundreds of machines used to enrich the Uranium. It’s known as the K-25 site.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Called the “Top Secret” City. The K-25 site, now demolished, where uranium was enriched for the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.

There were other efforts using different enrichment techniques at other locations on the large laboratory site.

Today the Laboratory has very active programs. Especially for the production and use of neutrons for imaging and other high-tech application, as well as programs for our nuclear stockpile.

I stumbled upon a machine there which brought back some amazing experiences from my early professional work. My first job at Boeing was to test aircraft using a much more modern version of this hardware. Later I went to work for Hewlett-Packard which was making modern vibration test systems.

This is a machine to test vibration (my first job) using a Hewlett-Packard Oscillator – HP’s first product made in the early 1940s. I worked on its successors many, many years later during my time at HP in the 1980s.

In the middle with the big dial is a Hewlett-Packard Oscillator. This was a version of the original product Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard made in the garage in Palo Alto in the late 1930s. One of the first customers was Disney which used them to make the soundtrack for the movie ‘Fantasia’ during the same time period. I actually did marketing work on the successor models many years later and was directly involved in obsoleting the product line.

We also visited the American Museum of Science and Energy which had very good exhibits on some of the newer efforts of the lab as well as its history and general information on nuclear energy.

Three Mile Island

As a brash young man, I decided I would put my huge brain to use in solving the world’s energy problem. Of course, I had to do something completely different so I decided to become a nuclear engineer. I went to graduate school in Seattle where the campus not only had a nuclear reactor but it was housed in a glass building for all to see. Seriously, it’s a landmark now.

Not a full year into my studies the first large-scale accident at a commercial plant in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. So much to my surprise when I noticed it along my route and I stopped by for a visit.

I remember flying with my professor in his private plane to the nearest NRC office in Portland Oregon to be briefed. The accident occurred in Unit 2 which has been shut down since the accident. Unit 1 remained in operation until 2019. Both are being decommissioned now – decade-long processes.

For me, it was a short sharp shock that essentially ended my career before it started. The more I learned about the industry the less I wanted to work in the field. I think the final straw was when I heard that nuclear engineers had the highest rate of suicides of all engineering degrees (probably not true 😉).