Maybe I'll stay in Albany

Not that the 15 miles seperating me from Corvallis would be of much help if the worst happens. I just read in the Gazette Times that OSU got a grant to build an experimental nuclear reactor far hotter than any conventional reactor. Any mistakes by students and profs designing and building that thing and Corvallis, well, I'm 15 miles away from you now and right on I5. I might make it out. Maybe I can outrun or outwit the radiation clouds! HAHAHAHAHA. Below is the article:


"Oregon State gets grant to test nuclear reactors

CORVALLIS (AP) — Oregon State University researchers have gotten a five-year, $6 million grant from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to test and study new designs for nuclear reactors.

The Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics is researching a type of reactor that operates at temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees and uses gas instead of water for cooling.

Although the new reactors are three times as hot as existing ones, they are also 35 to 50 percent more energy-efficient, cost less to construct and create 50 percent less nuclear waste.

OSU will build a one-quarter-scale reactor as part of its research to test the new reactor designs at a cost of $3.6 million."

The words I don't like in above article "to test it". They're going to build and test it? And what if it fails the test and sends up a nuclear reactive cloud. I guess Corvallis could kiss its green image goodbye, for one thing. I'm cracking myself up tonight. The upside might be maybe I wouldn't have to get any cats, or people for that matter, fixed in the entire state. Survivors would be sterile! Now I'm really cracking myself up.


I hope they're careful in their building of this experimental nuclear reactor because if they're not there could be some major fallout (hahahahaha, get it?) Actually, it's probably not funny. I suppose this will up OSU's target approval rating for terrorists too. Will terrorists, try to blend into the Corvallis culture sipping coffee at the Beanery, while making their plans to get at that reactors fuel?

I remember right after 911. Talk turned to the safety of small university reactors and if they had nuclear material that could be stolen to create a dirty bomb. Somebody tested the security levels at several of the universities, entering the facility without letting the department know ahead of time, that they were going to try to gain access.

I forget how OSU did in the security tests. At that time, a campus security worker had asked me to trap a cat she fed near the OSU reactor. This was right after 911. During the night, a stranger, me, with a suspicious object, cat trap, walks right up to the OSU reactor building and disappears under the front steps and comes out, without the suspicious object. Nobody said a word.

Later on, I needed to use a bathroom badly. I"d been sitting in my car in the rad center parking lot freezing. Even though it was the middle of the night, students and staff occasionally were still entering or leaving the building. I just slipped right on in behind one of them. The door was on a delayed sort of spring, so when someone opened it, took it awhile to actually close all the way behind them.

My private assessment of the security of the OSU reactor was that it is nonexistent. It was also sort of reassuring, in the world at that time, that nobody would hassle someone who didn't need hassled, a cat trapper bothering nobody, being quiet without intent to harm anything. It kind of reassured me after 911 that people were not going to overreact and think of everybody as enemy. In a way. In another way, it was just another long cold freezing night out after a hungry unfixed kitty.

I guess some events just really don't relate to others. Who in the world would be dumb enough to try to find a smidgeon of usable radioactive material in an OSU nuclear physics teaching program. Nobody. And nobody would think blowing up the building itself would do anything to a reactor either. The threat posed by these small teaching reactors was overplayed big time, I felt, by media. Hahahaha.

This reactor will be much bigger. Well, I hope they're building it behind some heavy duty mass.