Kodak Basement Lab Housed Small Nuclear Reactor 169
McGruber writes "The Rochester (NY) Democrat-Chronicle has the interesting story of the Eastman Kodak Co.'s Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier, which was housed in Building 82 of Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. The multiplier contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched (weapons-grade) uranium. Kodak used it to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, as well as for tests related to neutron radiography, an imaging technique. From the article: 'When Kodak decided six years ago to close down the device, still more scrutiny followed. Federal regulators made them submit detailed plans for removing the substance. When the highly enriched uranium was packaged into protective containers and spirited away in November 2007, armed guards were surely on hand. All of this — construction of a bunker with two-foot-thick concrete walls, decades of research and esoteric quality control work with a neutron beam, the safeguarding and ultimate removal of one of the more feared substances on earth — was done pretty much without anyone in the Rochester community having a clue.'"
Research rector in Finland (Score:4, Informative)
The department of physics at our university (Aalto university, Finland) has their own nuclear reactor. [wikipedia.org] This brings the total number of nuclear reactors in Finland to five.
Re:Reminds me about LA's nuclear reactor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reminds me about LA's nuclear reactor (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/zentrum/grossgeraete/ber2/index_en.html [helmholtz-berlin.de]
http://www.enygf.eu/technical-visits/training-reactor-vr1.html [enygf.eu]
What's more, these are testing facilities, a hocus pocus test sites.
I had a clue (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
3.5 lbs? Get another 30 times as much and you'll be close to a critical mass (bare sphere, 85% enriched). 3.5 lbs isn't that dangerous or, by itself, all that interesting from a nuclear weapons proliferation standpoint.
Fission occurred, but it needed to be pumped by an external neutron source and a runaway chain reaction was pretty much impossible. We're only talking about a ~6 cm sphere of it.
24 nuclear universities in just the US (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors; the majority of them belong to universities. Most were built in the 60's, most are General Atomics TRIGA reactors, and the power outputs range from 1 W to 10 MW. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors [wikipedia.org]
A few other civilian groups are licensed to have nuclear material, and of course other sectors and nations have lots of the stuff. It's really pretty common.
Re:General Atomics in San Diego (Score:5, Informative)
It's called General Atomics, for chrissakes. I mean, it's not as though they're disguising it.
Penn State has oldest reactor (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_State_University_Radiation_Science_%26_Engineering_Center [wikipedia.org]
They used to give tours to science undergraduates. It was a big swimming pool and you could see the Cherenkov radiation as you watched from the top of the pool.
Very interesting!
Re:Most unusual part of the story - weapons grade? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a neutron source, not a power-generating reactor. It used a smidgeon (tenth of a gram or so) of Cf-252 to spit out some initial neutrons, said neutrons being used to kick off a small (non-self-sustaining) chain reaction in the U-235. The U-235 reaction multiplies the Cf-252 flux by a few orders of magnitude and is the source of the overwhelming majority of the neutron flux. In order to keep such a source compact (and in order to not have to deal with the complications afforded by exposing tons of U-238 to a neutron flux), you probably need to use HEU for such a device.
Once you've got it up and running, you can then use the neutrons to activate other materials and observe the spectra of whatever your neutron-activated target material emits, which probably enables you to know with a very high degree of accuracy, what your target material was made of. Once you're done with it, pull out the Californium and the whole thing shuts itself down.
Kodak didn't make the HEU, the DoE made the HEU. Kodak was licensed to use it, under very strict controls. It wasn't "hidden in a basement lab", it was buried in a basement for both radiological and security reasons, and it wasn't "forgotten about", its existence just wasn't widely publicized. The DoE knew where it was all the time. It just didn't want to publicize it, for obvious reasons.
Re:sigh... (Score:5, Informative)
And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.
Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)
Re:sigh... (Score:4, Informative)
[rolls eyes]
A block of enriched uranium isn't much different from a block of regular uranium (it's *slightly* more radioactive), which is to say you could handle it with gloves, hide it under your bed, dress it up like Natalie Portman and have it sitting at your breakfast table while eating your oatmeal, and you would not be in serious health danger. We're not talking plutonium or cobalt-60, here. As long as you didn't powder it (it's pyrophoric) or try to eat it, it is not particularly reactive or dangerous, especially if in a properly shielded container. Sitting in the lab there was no more risk than, say, your average hospital that has a radiation therapy facility. In fact, probably less because of the nature of the isotopes involved (the isotopes in radiation treatment are MUCH more radioactive).