What does it feel like/smell like/sound like if you are in a room (especially a cavern) with a nuclear reactor? This is a fusion reactor, but I assume that a fission reactor would be similar.
Nuclear Reactor: what does it feel like?
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If you are inside the containment vessel, there'd be heat (lots and lots of heat -- think surface of the sun type of heat).
If you are inside the control room, then there would be the standard smells, feelings, sounds of an office area where power production is monitored. See scenes from The China Syndrome for some ideas.
The point is that there isn't any special sensory output from a properly functioning nuclear reactor. There might be sounds coming from the reactor cooling system, water pipes, alarms and such.
If you are inside the control room, then there would be the standard smells, feelings, sounds of an office area where power production is monitored. See scenes from The China Syndrome for some ideas.
The point is that there isn't any special sensory output from a properly functioning nuclear reactor. There might be sounds coming from the reactor cooling system, water pipes, alarms and such.
Actually, a fission reactor and a fusion reactor would not be similar at all. Completely different processes, using completely different materials. And, remember, no one has yet constructed a working industrial fusion reactor.
caw
caw
There are no fusion reactors in caverns. The only ones in existence are in college basements.
The German W7-X is pretty close to working well enough to be a model for a commercial version and the US Government just put serious backing into producing viable commercial models in less than a decade. Might read up on those.
By the way, nobody walks into a fusion reactor, you'd be vapor and ash long before you got close enough. If you're trying to describe one that is built in a mythical cavern in the future, it will look and sound like machinery running.
Jeff
There are no fusion reactors in caverns. The only ones in existence are in college basements.
The German W7-X is pretty close to working well enough to be a model for a commercial version and the US Government just put serious backing into producing viable commercial models in less than a decade. Might read up on those.
By the way, nobody walks into a fusion reactor, you'd be vapor and ash long before you got close enough. If you're trying to describe one that is built in a mythical cavern in the future, it will look and sound like machinery running.
Jeff
Thank you. What if the characters are in hazmat suits???
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Thank you!
The reactor core of a fission reactor has no moving parts. It works by radiation; think of the suns rays, only hotter. You don't make any noise getting a tan. The moving parts of the plant as a whole are similar to most types of power plant, viz. a turbine. So, a whirring sound.
Fusion I'm not sure. There are various types of prototype design; each would make a different noise, if any. A tokamak might make an electrical hum, as high-frequency magnetic oscillations are involved. But of course so will any power plant.
If you feel anything as a result of a nuclear reactor, it's broken and you're going to die.
Fusion I'm not sure. There are various types of prototype design; each would make a different noise, if any. A tokamak might make an electrical hum, as high-frequency magnetic oscillations are involved. But of course so will any power plant.
If you feel anything as a result of a nuclear reactor, it's broken and you're going to die.
Charles Stross has a great blog post about what it's like to visit a nuclear reactor.
Nothing like this will be built again
What really stands out to me is the obsessive safety culture. No matter how sci-fi your setting, there are going to be lots and lots of warning signs and cross-checks and clinically spotless floors.
Nothing like this will be built again
What really stands out to me is the obsessive safety culture. No matter how sci-fi your setting, there are going to be lots and lots of warning signs and cross-checks and clinically spotless floors.
It's probably also worth point out that fusion is a very natural process that goes on in every star. Fission chain-reaction, however, isn't a natural process. While fission happens, spontaneously, in a few known isotopes, like U-235, those are very rare, and never, in nature, concentrated sufficiently to permit a chain-reaction to take place. If they did, they would instantaneously disappear in a gigantic detonation, which is exactly what happens in an atom bomb. To fuel an atom bomb, or a controlled fission reactor, humans have to work very hard to produce a sufficient quantity of the fissionable material, under very very very controlled conditions. When those conditions go out of control, we have Chernobyl and Fukushima.
caw
caw
Just wanted to point out that apparently there've been instances of naturally-occurring fission reactors in the past. Pretty cool, no?
Yeah, these are somewhere between a reactor and a bomb. They basically meltdown themselves in a short time. blacbird is right that useful fission requires precise control. A reactor requires precise balance to keep running but not melt down. A bomb requires a rapid reaction to generate enough energy before it blows itself apart.
Fascinating article, thanks. My main point should have contained the caveat that I was addressing today's uranium isotope situation, not that of the ancient past, which, as the article accurately documents, was significantly different. These natural uranium reactor situations were very low power, rare, and limited in extent, but intriguing to know about.
caw
caw
Howdy aygnm,
There will be plumbing and heat.
Depending upon the exact mechanism that ever gets implemented, there maybe unique sounds, etc from the fusion process itself, as mentioned upthread. However, the goal of all of them is to do nothing more exotic than to generate heat. That would then likely be used to generate steam(or equivalent) and then drive a turbine for the electricity. Like we've been doing for a long time. That will involve plumbing and pumps, etc.
There are thermo-electric processes other than steam turbines (ie Peltier), but they are currently not as efficient.
But whatever thermo-electric process is used, Peltier or steam turbine, you still have to get rid of all the waste heat - think of nuclear reactor cooling towers. If you're 'in a room', I imagine that will be a major focus.
So, sweaty people bitching about noisy pumps--that's my vote.
Techs
There will be plumbing and heat.
Depending upon the exact mechanism that ever gets implemented, there maybe unique sounds, etc from the fusion process itself, as mentioned upthread. However, the goal of all of them is to do nothing more exotic than to generate heat. That would then likely be used to generate steam(or equivalent) and then drive a turbine for the electricity. Like we've been doing for a long time. That will involve plumbing and pumps, etc.
There are thermo-electric processes other than steam turbines (ie Peltier), but they are currently not as efficient.
But whatever thermo-electric process is used, Peltier or steam turbine, you still have to get rid of all the waste heat - think of nuclear reactor cooling towers. If you're 'in a room', I imagine that will be a major focus.
So, sweaty people bitching about noisy pumps--that's my vote.
Techs
As for smell, I wouldn't expect there to be much of curious smells other the smell of cleaners. About a fusion reactor, strong magnetic fields would be caged in some thick metal. The fusion reaction would be bottled by these magnetic fields and much of what escapes is going to be electric discharge. The gases and plasmas do not smell until they are mixed with other chemicals.
Fission reactors can be more interesting because the elements used would be different. However, the heaviest byproducts that come out of fission reactions as a gas do not smell. Uranium and Radon does decay to Polonium which has an extremely strong smell if one can smell it, but remains as a solid metal under SATP. Emissions of polonium throughout a plant is extremely problematic due its high radioactivity and so would be sought to be confined and suppressed if it did escape into that environment.
Fission reactors can be more interesting because the elements used would be different. However, the heaviest byproducts that come out of fission reactions as a gas do not smell. Uranium and Radon does decay to Polonium which has an extremely strong smell if one can smell it, but remains as a solid metal under SATP. Emissions of polonium throughout a plant is extremely problematic due its high radioactivity and so would be sought to be confined and suppressed if it did escape into that environment.
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And remember after a day or so you won't hear anything.
I worked in an office suspended over a railway line that shook very time a train went past - every 2 minutes.
Once a guy turned up and commented on how noisy it was and how the entire building shook almost constantly. It took us a while to realise there was anything going on!
I worked in an office suspended over a railway line that shook very time a train went past - every 2 minutes.
Once a guy turned up and commented on how noisy it was and how the entire building shook almost constantly. It took us a while to realise there was anything going on!
There are no working fusion reactors, so it's a bit hard to say.
Realistically, I'd imagine something like the inside of a datacentre crossed with a pumping station - there will be a lot of noise from pump and turbines, a lot of pipes and cable runs and warning signs and security doors and a constant, vague smell of cooking dust from hot pipes no one can quite reach to clean properly.
I used to work in a massive datacentre and it was a horrible, hot, very noisy place (modern datacentres are *not* cold!) - yours is only going to be worse.
Realistically, I'd imagine something like the inside of a datacentre crossed with a pumping station - there will be a lot of noise from pump and turbines, a lot of pipes and cable runs and warning signs and security doors and a constant, vague smell of cooking dust from hot pipes no one can quite reach to clean properly.
I used to work in a massive datacentre and it was a horrible, hot, very noisy place (modern datacentres are *not* cold!) - yours is only going to be worse.
Hazmat suits are not radiation suits. In a radiation suit you can spend a little time in an irradiated area, but inside a reactor means no living thing.
Jeff
I went on a school tour of the nuclear reactor in Pinawa, Manitoba many, many years ago. All I can remember is that it was bright, spotlessly clean, and smelled like machine oil. The floors and walls were concrete and our voices and footsteps echoes off the hard surfaces. Sorry I can't remember more, but there really wasn't much there that I found of interest as a 16 year-old girl, lol.
Yes. Many years ago I toured the Point Lapreau nuclear station, and even then few workers went near the machinery. It was all heavily mechanized/robotized, and people stayed in the nice, incredibly clean areas.
(Side track - the thing I remember most about it was the discussion of how the water cooling system had about five backups to keep it from sucking up any fish. Any fish that died in the Point Lapreau cooling system would have committed deliberate suicide.)
(Side track - the thing I remember most about it was the discussion of how the water cooling system had about five backups to keep it from sucking up any fish. Any fish that died in the Point Lapreau cooling system would have committed deliberate suicide.)
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What does it feel like to be inside the core of a nuclear reactor?
As it happens, there is some actual data about this.
In 1957 a graphite moderated, air-cooled plutonium production reactor at the Windscale facility in Yorkshire, England (now known as Sellafield-I've seen it from a distance) had a fire in the reactor core. There is an old account of the accident in a book "The Careless Atom" by Sheldon Novick. It makes for a complicated story, but the part of direct relevance for this thread is that at one point during the incident, workers donned protective gear and went INTO THE REACTOR CORE to see WTF was going on. One of the workers removed an access plate and saw that the fuel rods were glowing red hot, with beads of molten metal running off them. The graphite moderator had swollen due to the release of heat from lattice damage to the graphite moderator, known as "Wigner energy." As a result, the control rods were jammed and could not be removed.
The technicians replaced the access hatch and got the Hell out of there. In the end, it was decided to dump a large amount of water on the core to quench the heat release long enough to reinsert the control rods and shut down the chain reaction. Given that hot uranium is pyrophoric (i.e., adding water to it causes a fire), the official report said something to the effect that "We can't guarantee that we could get away with this twice."
The Government, amongst other actions, impounded milk produced in downwind areas and converted it to cheese (if memory serves; I could be mistaken in this. The reason being that you could store the cheese until the Iodine-131 decayed to safe levels.) In the early 1980's, I remember reading a summary of Government reports of a prospective study of thyroid cancer incidence which established that something like 30 people died as a result of the release of fission products; I think this may have been the first admission by a government body that a nuclear reactor accident had resulted in the death of downwinders.
Novick's account gives no indication of physiological effects out of the normal experienced by the technicians. Mind, they were wearing protective gear. I do, however, have some information that might bear on exposure to high levels of x-rays. In my university days, one of the things I liked to do was to wander through the stacks and pull items off at random, and read bits of them (The random search capabilities of engines like Google are NOT a replacement for this strategy!).
On one such occasion, I pulled out a volume of Science Abstracts from I believe 1897. I opened it to a random page, and found an abstract from a paper about the visual experience of viewing high intensity X-rays. It appears that one sees a faint yellowish-green color. I put that volume back on the shelf!
A phenomenon that accompanies high intensities of ionizing radiation in media of low atomic number such as air or water is Cherenkov radiation, which is the source of the eerie blue light associated with swimming pool reactors. Its appearance is a common thread in accounts of criticality accidents. Trust me, if you are handling fissile material and have a whoops and see a flash of blue light, that is really bad news for you! The Los Alamos National Laboratory has on its web pages a number of reports on accidents of that nature-they make for sobering reading. Truly.
As to other physiological effects of exposure to levels of ionizing radiation typical of the inside of a reactor core, I seem to recall reading accounts of a tingling feeling in the extremities, but I can't document that.
Finally, there are the celebrated criticality accidents associated with Project Y of the Manhattan Project: The deaths of Louis Slotin (as fictionalized in "Fat Man and Little Boy") and Harry Daghlian. Harry Daghlian, just after the surrender of Japan, was working with a plutonium pit (subsequently named "The Demon Core" as it also later killed Slotin; it later performed normally in the Crossroads Able shot) in an experiment that involved adding extra fissile material around the core to test its criticality. One of the safety protocols stipulated that one should never add the last piece of Pu or Tu (Tuballoy; natural Uranium, as opposed to Oy, Oralloy, enriched U) from above. Harry was in a hurry and violated this rule. He dropped the last cube of U, there was a blue flash, and he instinctively swatted the extra piece away with one hand. Before he died, he gave permission to have that hand photographed:
https://www.google.com/search?q=har...=6iXvWM_4OqrejwTAja3YAg#imgrc=vcZUE-9RFRMSlM:
I cannot say it is a pretty thing to see.
I hope these comments are instructive.
As it happens, there is some actual data about this.
In 1957 a graphite moderated, air-cooled plutonium production reactor at the Windscale facility in Yorkshire, England (now known as Sellafield-I've seen it from a distance) had a fire in the reactor core. There is an old account of the accident in a book "The Careless Atom" by Sheldon Novick. It makes for a complicated story, but the part of direct relevance for this thread is that at one point during the incident, workers donned protective gear and went INTO THE REACTOR CORE to see WTF was going on. One of the workers removed an access plate and saw that the fuel rods were glowing red hot, with beads of molten metal running off them. The graphite moderator had swollen due to the release of heat from lattice damage to the graphite moderator, known as "Wigner energy." As a result, the control rods were jammed and could not be removed.
The technicians replaced the access hatch and got the Hell out of there. In the end, it was decided to dump a large amount of water on the core to quench the heat release long enough to reinsert the control rods and shut down the chain reaction. Given that hot uranium is pyrophoric (i.e., adding water to it causes a fire), the official report said something to the effect that "We can't guarantee that we could get away with this twice."
The Government, amongst other actions, impounded milk produced in downwind areas and converted it to cheese (if memory serves; I could be mistaken in this. The reason being that you could store the cheese until the Iodine-131 decayed to safe levels.) In the early 1980's, I remember reading a summary of Government reports of a prospective study of thyroid cancer incidence which established that something like 30 people died as a result of the release of fission products; I think this may have been the first admission by a government body that a nuclear reactor accident had resulted in the death of downwinders.
Novick's account gives no indication of physiological effects out of the normal experienced by the technicians. Mind, they were wearing protective gear. I do, however, have some information that might bear on exposure to high levels of x-rays. In my university days, one of the things I liked to do was to wander through the stacks and pull items off at random, and read bits of them (The random search capabilities of engines like Google are NOT a replacement for this strategy!).
On one such occasion, I pulled out a volume of Science Abstracts from I believe 1897. I opened it to a random page, and found an abstract from a paper about the visual experience of viewing high intensity X-rays. It appears that one sees a faint yellowish-green color. I put that volume back on the shelf!
A phenomenon that accompanies high intensities of ionizing radiation in media of low atomic number such as air or water is Cherenkov radiation, which is the source of the eerie blue light associated with swimming pool reactors. Its appearance is a common thread in accounts of criticality accidents. Trust me, if you are handling fissile material and have a whoops and see a flash of blue light, that is really bad news for you! The Los Alamos National Laboratory has on its web pages a number of reports on accidents of that nature-they make for sobering reading. Truly.
As to other physiological effects of exposure to levels of ionizing radiation typical of the inside of a reactor core, I seem to recall reading accounts of a tingling feeling in the extremities, but I can't document that.
Finally, there are the celebrated criticality accidents associated with Project Y of the Manhattan Project: The deaths of Louis Slotin (as fictionalized in "Fat Man and Little Boy") and Harry Daghlian. Harry Daghlian, just after the surrender of Japan, was working with a plutonium pit (subsequently named "The Demon Core" as it also later killed Slotin; it later performed normally in the Crossroads Able shot) in an experiment that involved adding extra fissile material around the core to test its criticality. One of the safety protocols stipulated that one should never add the last piece of Pu or Tu (Tuballoy; natural Uranium, as opposed to Oy, Oralloy, enriched U) from above. Harry was in a hurry and violated this rule. He dropped the last cube of U, there was a blue flash, and he instinctively swatted the extra piece away with one hand. Before he died, he gave permission to have that hand photographed:
https://www.google.com/search?q=har...=6iXvWM_4OqrejwTAja3YAg#imgrc=vcZUE-9RFRMSlM:
I cannot say it is a pretty thing to see.
I hope these comments are instructive.