Kodak kept a secret nuclear reactor underground for over 30 years | Hacker News Reader

Kodak kept a secret nuclear reactor underground for over 30 years

tweaktown.com

65 pointsantonellis28 comments

The best article is the original one, which also hosts the primary sources (NRC documents). Maybe you could change the submission?

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120511/NEWS01/...

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/assets/pdf/A2189208511.p...

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/assets/pdf/A2189207511.p...

some stuff:

* It's a subcritical (K_eff = 0.99) neutron multiplier using 1.5 kg highly-enriched (93%) uranium. K_eff = 0.99 means each fission event triggers a cascade of ~100 more fission events before the activity ceases. In a critical reactor (K_eff = 1) the chain reaction doesn't stop, it perpetuates itself

* The primary neutron source is californium-252, a radioactive isotope which emits neutrons when it decays (by spontaneous fission)

* Highly-enriched uranium is the neutron multiplier (operating as a subcritical reactor). For each neutron in, you get ~100 fissions and ~240 fission neutrons, of which <140 are excess (not absorbed by the uranium itself)

* Runs at about 6 watts => 4 * 10^11 neutrons/second created

* 0.33 Curies of spent "fuel" remain

First article says "terrorists covet it". That's pretty lame of it.

The article ends with the news source they got the story from: http://www.techspot.com/news/48601-kodak-maintained-an-under...

The source is much cleaner than the submitted site. After reading both articles I feel that the submission is just a rip-off.

Edit: I didn't go deep enough down the rabbit hole. Thanks eli & falling.

No, actually that links to the poorly written gizmodo story. Itself a knockoff of the local paper, http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120511/NEWS01/...

Pretty sure that is both the original source and the most accurate write up.

I am being presented with a paywall.

Try this one (no URL junk):

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120511/NEWS01/...

I think this is the original source http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120511/NEWS01/...

and it's a better article too.

I smell an agenda piece. Who are these "Center for Nonproliferation Studies" exactly? Is that even a real subject? What do they know about photographic imaging, which is all about radiation, or any other industrial process? Who are they that scientists should beg their permission to work?

really? the article seemed pretty neutral to me, no sensationalistic spin.

Having grown up in Rochester with many friends and family who were Kodak employees, I thought I'd ask around. My father, a software developer at Kodak who wouldn't have had any particular reason to deal with the reactor, says he was well aware of it and that it wasn't any big secret.

Given that they filed plenty of public paperwork and notified all the relavent authorities, I'm inclined to agree.

But "Kodak ran a registered nuclear device everybody knew about and that was dismantled years ago" does not nearly sound as catchy as something about a "secret nuclear reactor in an underground bunker"!

When I was a student at the University of Arizona '86-90 there was a reactor on campus.

http://reactor.arl.arizona.edu/facilities-mainmenu-32/25-nuc...

It was just decommissioned:

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/education/college/it-s-offic...

NCSU has a currently-operating PULSTAR reactor on campus. I walk by the building multiple times per day when classes are in session. http://www.ne.ncsu.edu/nrp/index.html

One of these days, I need to see if I can get inside and take a look around.

UC Davis has one, even though the city calls itself "nuclear free"

http://mnrc.ucdavis.edu/about.html

It's not in Davis or even on campus which is adjacent to Davis. It's on McClellan Air Force Base.

Sure hope they don't have smoke detectors in their homes there...

Small research reactors are not uncommon at large companies and universities. Even Reed college has one, which I visited last year when I was traveling through Portland. "Tested" recently visited it too

http://www.tested.com/videos/44278-will-and-norm-visit-the-r...

Such reactors were typically fueled with HEU (Reed exchanged their HEU fuel for LEU only a few years ago).

And no reactor is secret -- all civilian reactors in the United States are registered with the NRC and you can look them up on the NRC website (and wikipedia).

Gizmodo may have degraded the story, but the original source (local paper) wasn't much better. I'm afraid it's just another hack story about fission by a hack journalist who couldn't be bothered to do the most basic web search on what he was reporting.

This isn't technically a nuclear reactor (not critical), so it doesn't appear on any of the usual lists like [1] or [2] (prior to edits made after this story came out). It isn't mentioned on any major NRC page, although they host some of its paperwork [3].

[1] http://nucleus.iaea.org/RRDB/RR/ReactorSearch.aspx

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_nuclear_r...

[3] https://www.google.com/?hl=en#q=kodak+site:nrc.gov+-filetype...

Thanks, didn't even see it was a CFX. Add calling it a reactor to the list of distortions.

The only really interesting thing about this is the claim that it was weapons grade uranium. I wonder if they mean the same thing other people do when they say that (for me, 90+% U-235), or if the mention of californium means it was blended?

Weapons grade HEU is typically 80% or above, though strictly speaking anything above about 20% is pretty easy to make a nuke out of provided you have enough material.

Also, back in the day it was quite normal for such small research reactors to use HEU (specifically, about 93% enrichment), and such reactors were pretty commonplace at the time. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_reactor

There's only on the order of 1 mg of Cf-252 in the source (my estimate) -- enough for the order of 10^9 neutrons/second. It's not a meaningful amount of fissile material. By weapons-grade they mean the uranium in the neutron multiplier is >90% U-235.

Cf-252: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=98&n=154

as you can read from what I think is the original source (http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120511/NEWS01/...) californium was the neutron source and uranium was used in the multiplier.

«A steady stream of neutrons is needed for these purposes. Kodak used small research reactors, including one at Cornell University, and possessed a dollop of californium-252, a radioactive isotope that endlessly sheds neutrons.

But it wanted a more potent in-house system, so in 1974 it acquired a californium neutron flux multiplier, known as a CFX. Small plates of highly enriched uranium multiplied the neutron flow from a tiny californium core.»

Reading the original source completely changes everything. Thank you.

Kodak would have had huge hooks into the national security side of things in the US government.

They made all kinds of films used for imaging various parts of the spectrum, and would have had their researchers available for the USG (surely at a price of course). That they had fissionable material is entirely reasonable and expected.

Some comments:

1. This isn't a nuclear reactor, technically -- it's a neutron multiplier. The total amount of fissile material is sub-critical, so it can't sustain fission.

2. If you Google "Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier", you can find links to, among other things, the front page of a Kodak-published paper that talks about the use and acquisition of this source. It sounds like it was obtained through a pilot program with the DoE, looking for alternative uses of their nuclear technology. There's also a link to a letter from Kodak's head of radiation safety to the NRC talking about the shut-down and decommissioning of the multiplier.

There was a nuclear reactor in downtown Atlanta for 25 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neely_Nuclear_Research_Center link to details of that reactor for anyone interested. Kind of sad that my alma mater had to shut her down.

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