WCfan
Pulse
A little under a year ago I posted a cell phone picture of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nuclear Reactor (UWNR). This reactor is used for experimental work and is used to teach laboratory courses. Today we performed the last laboratory, which is the culmination of an entire year of laboratories and four years of undergraduate work, the Pulsing Lab.
During this lab a specially made control rod, called a transient rod, is ejected from the reactor core. This allows the reactor to increase in power very quickly. The power increases from basically 0 MW all the way to around 1000 MW in a few milliseconds. In relative terms, 1000 MW is about the combined horsepower of just under 450 SD40s running full out. The bright flash you see in this video is related to this exponential increase in power. In a bomb, the power would keep increasing exponentially. But in our case the power will taper from 1000 MW back to about 0 MW in a few more milliseconds. This is why this lab is called the pulsing experiment – the reactor power is "pulsed" in power.
Maybe you’re wondering why the power increase stops instead of increasing exponentially? Unlike a bomb, the UWNR is designed to stop the nuclear chain reaction as the power increases. This effect is inherently built into the fuel, meaning that no mechanical force or human interaction is needed to stop the chain reaction – it happens automatically due to its design. The weird beeping sort of sound at the end is the point where the operator took action and pushed the SCRAM button, releasing the control rods into the core, thus resetting the experiment. This action is not required, but done for standard operating procedure.
Pulse
A little under a year ago I posted a cell phone picture of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nuclear Reactor (UWNR). This reactor is used for experimental work and is used to teach laboratory courses. Today we performed the last laboratory, which is the culmination of an entire year of laboratories and four years of undergraduate work, the Pulsing Lab.
During this lab a specially made control rod, called a transient rod, is ejected from the reactor core. This allows the reactor to increase in power very quickly. The power increases from basically 0 MW all the way to around 1000 MW in a few milliseconds. In relative terms, 1000 MW is about the combined horsepower of just under 450 SD40s running full out. The bright flash you see in this video is related to this exponential increase in power. In a bomb, the power would keep increasing exponentially. But in our case the power will taper from 1000 MW back to about 0 MW in a few more milliseconds. This is why this lab is called the pulsing experiment – the reactor power is "pulsed" in power.
Maybe you’re wondering why the power increase stops instead of increasing exponentially? Unlike a bomb, the UWNR is designed to stop the nuclear chain reaction as the power increases. This effect is inherently built into the fuel, meaning that no mechanical force or human interaction is needed to stop the chain reaction – it happens automatically due to its design. The weird beeping sort of sound at the end is the point where the operator took action and pushed the SCRAM button, releasing the control rods into the core, thus resetting the experiment. This action is not required, but done for standard operating procedure.