Back to School: Reed College Reactor

0:00Hey, this is Kelly McEvers, host of Atlas Obscura. I hope you liked this week's stories about schools and places that have a little something extra, unusual traditions, ceremonies, and distinct customs. If you missed any of these stories, you can go check them out. We have tons of school stories. And if you have stories about schools with strange, unusual, or wondrous traditions, or ceremonies, tell us about it. This is a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes, so please call back if you get disconnected. Or better, you can record a voice memo and send it to us. A hello at atlasobscura.com. All right, school is starting. Here's today's episode. Reed College is a quintessential liberal arts school in the Northwest. It's got small classrooms, hands-on learning, just about 1,400 students, and it's all on

1:04a beautiful campus in Portland, Oregon. As you might expect at a liberal arts school, popular majors that read are things like psychology, political science, history. But for the past 50 years, Reed students have had access to a scientific instrument that many people have never even seen before. It looks a little bit like a giant swimming pool. It glows. It's really beautiful color blue. You'll be able to find pictures of it online. Pictures don't do it justice. The blue glow just looks so amazing in person, and it doesn't look like anything else on Earth. That blue color is something called Sharinkov radiation, which is effectively like the sonic boom when something breaks the sound barrier, except for it's with light, and the blue glow are all of those light booms that are being emitted by those electrons. So it looks really amazing. And why is there a glowing blue pool of irradiated water at Reed?

2:09Well, because there's a nuclear reactor sitting at the bottom of that pool. I'm Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we are going to the world's only nuclear reactor operated by liberal arts undergraduates. And we're going to find out what happens when you go on the deep. More after this. The nuclear reactor at Reed College is at the bottom of a massive 25,000 gallon tank in the campus's chemistry building. The reactor itself though is only about the size of a washing machine, and it's run

3:12by 45 employees, 43 of which are students at the college, and two of which are full-time employees, one of whom is this guy. My name's Jerry Newhouse. I'm the director of the research reactor. I've been working at research reactors for about 20 years. Jerry Newhouse got his start as a student worker at Texas A&M. It meant he mainly did busy work, like keeping things clean and orderly, all so that the engineers could come and do their thing. And to be honest, he did not know much about nuclear reactors when he started working with them, but he learned pretty quickly that there is a real community among these folks. There's only about 30 of these facilities in the United States, so we're relatively rare. Even considering the universities with big engineering programs, there are only about two dozen schools in the U.S. that have a nuclear research reactor. So the percentage of people who can relate to the experience of the staff at Reed College

4:16is actually pretty small. It's not like the corner store where there's one on every corner. We don't have a whole lot of other people that we can talk with to figure out, you know, what are the best ways of doing things. And it's also similar for employees or student employees within a facility that they form really strong bonds and friendships between each other because the training program is very demanding. They spend a lot of hours together and they end up getting to know each other pretty well. And Jerry got his first job working with reactor, the same way that the students are redoed through a campus job posting. So even though these are student workers, and I was a student worker back in the day, our licenses are just as valid as someone who was a veteran of the Navy who got out and joined the reactor program and got a license. We received the exact same license. Truth be told, working with a nuclear reactor is not quite as dramatic as it sounds.

5:20There are, of course, a lot of safety protocols, but workers spend most of their days in the reactor's control room, you know, watching the controls. There are a lot of different pumps and fans and electrical devices always running, so it's actually a pretty noisy room to be in. When we have tours, we actually need to turn things off or we're not able to hear each other very well. So the control room is a lot quieter, but it's also sort of a hub of activity. Because of how many students go through the program, Reed represents a large portion of all students trained to operate a reactor. 25% of students who receive a nuclear research reactor license got them at Reed. The college also brings some real diversity to the nuclear reactor community. We have a much larger proportion of students who identify as gender minorities working at this reactor than is typical across the research reactor fleet.

6:21I've worked in staffs that were all male before and at the Reed reactor men are the minority. So it's something that we're really proud of that we have such a great diversity among our reactor operators and it's something that I think that we are doing really well. By one count, the Reed Research Reactor has licensed more female reactor operators than all the other research reactors in the world combined. The other thing that makes us also unusual is that Reed College is not some top engineering school. In fact, it doesn't offer engineering as a major. That means that the students operating this nuclear reactor are studying history and biology and art and theater. We're able to see things in a different way and develop procedures that might be different than if we were just a monolithic group of engineers. And also it gives people who are going out into different parts of society as experience

7:21of having worked with a reactor and having a good experience with it. And it lets them share that information with people that would never have that first or second-hand information before. They would just see scary movies like Chernobyl and that would be the only thing that they know about reactors. But in this case, they actually know someone who's been involved. The students also bring a sense of humor to the job. At one point, there was a family of rubber duckies floating on top of the reactor cooling water until federal inspectors kindly asked them to cut it out. Not for safety issues, mind you, just for protocol. Anyway, Jerry says that just because Reed does not have an engineering department, it doesn't mean the nuclear reactor is not being put to very good use. These research reactors aren't just for engineering. They're a wide range of sciences and fields of study that they have applications and it's something that a lot of people don't know about.

8:22One use for the research reactor is relevant to all those history majors Reed. Something that we can do is take a small sample of a clay artifact and compare it to samples of clay from other locations, different sources. And by comparing their composition, we can track where this artifact originated. We can track, help track different trade routes to see, oh yeah, they're clay with these characteristics all along this sort of route. And so we know that there must have been some sort of trade hub or source at a location that was starting out in this location. So how did this little liberal art school get this fancy, schmancy reactor? Well, you can thank Arthur F. Scott, one of the leading radio chemists of the 20th century for that. From the 1930s up to the late 1960s, Dr. Scott worked at Reed College, but he needed access to reactors to do his radio chemistry work and that meant having to travel to other reactors

9:26all over the Pacific Northwest. And finally, he just got fed up. He got to the point where it was really prohibitive to have to go out to these other schools that already had reactors to get the materials that he needed for his research and to support his teaching. In the 1960s, Dr. Scott got the thumbs up from the president of Reed College and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to build the nuclear reactor on campus. Construction took about a year and in the summer of 1968, the reactor became active. Dr. Scott used this reactor for his radio chemistry experiments. Today, the reactor's most common purposes have shifted to all sorts of new scientific explorations, many related to environmental work. So we're able to help with a lot of the material science work that's going into designing materials that would go into solar cells that are going into wind turbines. They're going into new filtration systems.

10:28We're able to see, you know, take samples and see what sorts of heavy metals are being absorbed by different plants and the forests in the Pacific Northwest. All this kind of work is work that we can help support at this reactor. Of course, the question you may be asking yourself is how in the world is any of this safe? Don't nuclear reactors emit radiation? I mean, there is a glowing blue pool, like something out of a cheap science fiction movie at the center of all of this. But the answer to that question is in the water itself. Besides glowing that incredible shade of electric blue, as electrically charged particles fly through the water, it speeds faster than the photons around them. That swimming pool is also what's keeping the workers safe. The water serves several functions, but one of them is that it's a pretty effective radiation shield. It does a great job of preventing any radiation from the reactor reaching our students at

11:31the surface and visitors. So someone that's inside of our reactor bay is actually, while the reactors operating, will actually receive less radiation than they would outside because the building is shielding them from cosmic radiation coming from outer space that they would receive if they're standing outside. Looking with students is what Jerry loves most about his job. At other reactor facilities, undergraduates don't always have access to the reactors, much less non-engineering students. That's just not the case at Reed College. I had a lot of schools undergraduates if they're allowed to participate at all. They're giving the job of washing the test tubes. They're not the ones designing and running experiments. And the students here get to do that. And I think they get to show that 18, 19, 20-year-olds are just as creative and smart and capable as anyone else. For the record, the Reed reactor is what's called a zero-risk facility.

12:34So even in the most catastrophic situations, there's no chance of overheating or meltdown. And if you yourself were to fall in the water, the only danger would be drowning. It's pretty safe. We should bring back the rubber duckies. Anyway, Reed College offers free tours of the reactor facility. So if you find yourself in Portland, you should check it out. We will put a link in the episode description. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. This episode was produced by Baudelaire. The production team includes... Doug Baldinger. Chris Nakka. Camille Family. Manolo Morales. Gabby Gladney. Our technical director is Casey Holtford. This episode was mixed by loose flaming. If you want to learn more, be sure to visit Atlas Obscura.com. There is a link in the episode description. And our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tindall. I'm Dylan Thurus. Wishing you all the wonder in the world. I will see you next time.