What you'll see

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A building that resembles a cooling tower, common to commercial nuclear power plants, houses our nuclear reactor and pool.

The NSC’s reactor sits at the bottom of a 100,000-gallon, 35-feet deep pool of very pure water. Our facility is one of a few places in the world where you can see the reactor directly.

See a video of a reactor pulse (MPG, 365 KB).

When operating, the reactor gives off a blue glow known as Cherenkov Radiation.

When an intense radioactive source ejects high-energy charged particles into a transparent material such as water, plastic, or glass, a ghostly bluish glow extending some distance into the medium can be seen. This phenomenon is easily observed when a room containing a swimming pool reactor or a gamma facility is darkened. [Ours is intense enough that our facility does not need darkening to be able to view this phenomenon.]

M. Russell Wehr, et al. Physics of the Atom, Fourth Edition. 495-6.

Special arrangements will allow visitors to see an elaborate radioactive-material counting laboratory and a demonstration of our high-purity germanium detectors.

The cooling tower is outside the main building:

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The control room and the reactor pool
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