Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
The reason for the informal secrecy, as it was explained to me, is that every so often someone would find out there was plutonium etc in the basement and have a public freak out, including on occasion other (non-STEM) professors at the same university. These people would try to organize crusades to get it shut down because evil. Intentionally obscuring its existence greatly mitigated this drama. They appreciated us continuing the tradition of keeping it out of sight and out of mind from the general public.
The publicity around this Kodak case was an example of why no one talks about nuclear labs. The public cannot be trusted to engage in a discussion about anything “nuclear” in good faith. There are quite a few areas of science like this.
I visited a few times as part of a research project I was involved in, and that experience was one of the factors that put me off pursuing a career in biomedical research.
But with less oversight, that also invites abuse.
You can probably imagine abuse on your own in an anima lab, but I would also point out after Obama banned gain of function research in 2014 U.S. scientists moved their lab to China where it continued without the same oversight, and bad things happened.
When he was well intentioned he seemed to be a total failure and when he was blatantly self interested he was monstrous.
I don’t think the right is another option but woof… this is tough
You're struggling now but presumably weren't struggling then even though it was obvious at the time that he was a bad person just like the rest of them.
On the other hand: https://youtu.be/HLAzeHnNgR8?si=rcgu4dkfY60icTuO
His "legacy" is completely a media creation.
We lost control of this country the day JFK was killed.
I don't mean to say that it's proven, because to my knowledge it is not. There is a great deal more evidence pointing to it being likely than necessary for it to be considered a mainstream theory.
> One of the contentions in support of this theory was that the furin cleavage site on the virus has never been found in nature. Therefore, to some, that meant it must have been created in a laboratory... Recently, Wu and coworkers identified a bat virus (Bat CoV CD35) that harbored a furin cleavage site identical to that found on SARS-CoV-2 (Zhu W, Huang Y, Gong J, et al. A novel bat coronavirus with a polybasic furin-like cleavage site.
> There is now abundant evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market that housed several live animals that were susceptible to the virus. Indeed, the early cases of COVID-19 centered on that section of the market.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03026-9
> The hunt for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has new leads. Researchers have identified half a dozen animal species that could have passed SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, to people, by reanalysing genomes collected from an animal market in Wuhan, China1. The study establishes the presence of animals and the virus at the market, although it does not confirm whether the animals themselves were infected with the virus.
I’m asking you to show that a reasonable person wouldn’t consider a lab origin, which is what you asserted.
This, despite the possibility seriously investigated by (at least the Americans) and finding very little evidence to support it, and far less than the zoonotic origin.
That's why it's a conspiracy theory, because it alleges a conspiracy.
The specific origins of the virus have not, to my knowledge, been confirmed.
I am not asserting that it was a lab leak; I’m merely asserting that it is not unreasonable to consider it possible.
Nowhere did I suggest that I believed it more likely to be the source than zoonotic spillover, nor did I assert anything about a coverup by any party.
Frankly, this whole discussion is a great example of why I commented. It should absolutely not be discouraged to consider less-likely explanations when the most likely has not been conclusively proven.
I'm not putting them in your mouth, I am stating what the most popular strains of the lab leak approach are.
> The specific origins of the virus have not, to my knowledge, been confirmed.
They have not, and realistically never will be. What would even constitute confirmation? If it leaked out of a lab, the lab and or CCP could own up to it. But zoonotic origin? You'd basically need a time machine to confirm it. The discussion by scientists is about the balance of evidence.
> nor did I assert anything about a coverup by any party.
I am not saying, or implying, you did. I'm sorry if you got that impression. The assertion of a coverup however is intrinsic to any version of the theory that it leaked from a lab. If someone believes that it originated in a lab then the only explanation for why it hasn't been proven yet is that the lab, the scientists, and/or the CCP is actively covering it up. Which is a textbook definition of a conspiracy.
> It should absolutely not be discouraged to consider less-likely explanations when the most likely has not been conclusively proven.
Who is discouraging considering the explanation? Take a look even at the wikipedia page [0]. Both scientists and varying government agencies have looked into the theory, and they have found no credible evidence to back it up, while finding plenty of evidence in support of zoonotic origin.
This discussion is not happening in early 2020, or even early 2021, when there is very little evidence to go on, it is happening in 2025 when there is plenty of evidence in support of zoonotic origin, and a of lack of evidence in favour of the lab leak theory.
Discussion on the topic isn't being suppressed, it's that those supporting the lab leak theory are supporting it despite the evidence to the contrary. They are using it to attack scientists and science broadly because they believe scientists are in on it (a conspiracy theory) [1][2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory#Gover...
[1]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-wi...
[2]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/lab-leak-fev...
I know I'm picking and choosing a bit in replying; I read your entire comment and gave it thought. If I don't quote it, it's likely simply because I agree or have nothing to add.
> I'm not putting them in your mouth, I am stating what the most popular strains of the lab leak approach are.
My apologies then, I misunderstood.
> What would even constitute confirmation?
I can't think of anything that would likely come to light after years that would qualify.
> If it leaked out of a lab, the lab and or CCP could own up to it.
I disagree. I believe they would, but cannot rule out that they would not.
Note that I am not asserting that they have hidden anything; I am saying that it's not unreasonable to leave open the possibility.
> But zoonotic origin? You'd basically need a time machine to confirm it. The discussion by scientists is about the balance of evidence.
I'm not in a discussion of scientists about the origin - I'm in a discussion on a forum of like-minded people :).
The fact that there is no proven origin at this point strongly suggests zoonotic origin. So strongly that I would put it at approximately the level of confident that I would have for a scientific theory - that I would consider it true and that evidence contradicting it would have to pass quite a high bar.
> They are using it to attack scientists and science broadly because they believe scientists are in on it (a conspiracy theory)
I agree, and don't like that either. My motivation is to say that we should leave room for investigation, and that we shouldn't try to limit the conversation of interested parties who want to continue considering it as a possibility.
I think the key difference here is that I see a distinction between saying "this isn't conclusive" and saying "the prevailing opinion is wrong". I'm saying the former, not the latter.
As a Joe Public, how do you suggest that I can verify the oversight of experts?
Is there sufficient oversight with animal testing in a place like Wuhan?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Gibbs
[3] https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/dupont-bilott-book-ex...
Oversight for PG&E should have come from the US EPA. I suppose the EPA should have handled Love Canal too, but the agency didn't exist when Hooker dumped their pollutants.
Your cultural references suggest you're American, so you don't have a direct way of interacting with a sovereign nation's internal affairs. You can, however, elect competent politicians who support a competent foreign service.
If you want to verify the work of experts, you need knowledge. You need to read, practice, and talk. Once you develop relevant expertise, you're an expert and no longer Joe Public. There are public universities near you where you can learn any of these topics. If you're in a remarkably remote location, you can take online courses. It takes time, but that's true of almost anything worth doing.
If you aren't willing to do that, you're just proving Asimov right: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
For the record I am not American and I have sat in on a few institutional review board meetings that pertained to animal welfare relating to a project that I was involved with.
I'm dismissive of and admittedly rather condescending to people who equate their ignorance to experts' knowledge. But that's the whole point: expertise isn't a hereditary title. It comes from study, and I support anyone's effort to gain it!
For what it's worth: if you've sat on an IRB you're not Joe Public. You may not be a scientist, but you're an expert in another field. You also know that, so I don't get what you're arguing.
[1]: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/eco-violence-rec...
Are there any other industries that don't involve animals that you feel the same way about? Why or why not?
Consider supporting politicians who respect expertise. If you aren't presented with that ballot choice, at least vote against the anti-intellectuals.
The climate activists of the 60s-90s stopped us from building more reactors, one of the cleanest sources of energy ever known.
And now that there are a number of barriers to creating new nuclear, the propaganda has flipped with fossil fuel companies supporting nuclear because they know it'll be decades before anything real can happen.
I have nothing against nuclear and if it can be built I'm for it. But at the moment, solar + battery is quick to deploy and about as cheap as you can get.
Yes, I am over-simplifying the very complex problem of grid management, but so are you.
Advancements in solar also are improving with clouds.
Also, you know, batteries. When someone makes it cost effective to install a device to sell your car battery power on the grid we'll also have a better time managing the grid during spikes... Would be nice if that also did home battery backup in blackouts... 70 kWh would get me through most of the ones I've experienced.
If the sun is shining vs not (and if further withdrawal will freeze the salt) absolutely controls power output.
And the plummeting price of solar modules makes it more cost effective to over provision for the case of clouds, and/or to mount solar panels to optimize for morning and evening production as well.
Generation costs are a small part of most consumers' bills, but particularly in CA.
If you look at the location marginal pricing map from CA ISO: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices
You'll see that right now (before solar has really kicked in), The price for the next megawatt hour of generation is $49 -- i.e., under 5c per kWh. That's comparable to the average price in PJM (east coast) at the same time:
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices
The big problem for California is that cheap generation via solar doesn't move the needle as much on consumer bills because of the transmission and distribution costs. In San Francisco, for example the distribution fee is over $0.20/kWh. That's twice what mine is in Pittsburgh. In contrast, the generation pricing is only about $0.04/kWh more than mine:
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
though this pricing does favor behind the meter generation such as residential solar.
People are always pointing out the marginal volumetric costs of electricity, which is indeed very high. But that is just reflection of the fact that we use so little energy because of our history of efficiency laws and the mild climate, so the fixed charges and taxes that combine into the volumetric price are much higher than in other states. And our extremely large fleet of behind the meter solar panels also contributes to the higher volumetric price of grid electricity. All together, this doesn't tell us much about whether renewables are a good policy or not.
Many of those other states avoid high electricity costs because they are cold states that don't use electricity for heat.
(When you factor in behind the meter, solar is, in fact, probably reducing the average cost to consumers.)
California's energy problems aren't due to the source of their energy.
The actual equation is solar + battery + gas fired power plant.
That’s the dirty secret behind intermittent power sources and why fossil fuel companies are all investing in solar and wind. Batteries are simply not enough to face the long term intermittence. It’s purely an intra-day solution at the moment and nobody knows how to actually run a large grid on purely intermittent sources.
Even China is actually aggressively pursuing nuclear at the same time it builds an insane amount of solar and gas fired power plants.
Solar is king in places like west Texas and Nevada. Massive sunny flat sprawling landscapes where the land is practically free.
It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny.
Gas becomes much more competitive because you only need 5 acres instead of 500, and the energy is 24/7.
When you compare the rates at which people recognize the need to decarbonize, to the rates at which people are willing to pay 20-50% more for green energy, an obvious and expected trend arises.... people overwhelming don't want to put their money where there mouth is. Or they want someone elses money to go where there mouth is.
It needs to be understood that almost all those "green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels" studies use the best case scenario to calculate those values.
To put that another way, gas meets it's ideal pretty much everywhere, whereas green energy meets it's ideal in small, often far from society, spots. Transmission can bridge the gap to a degree, but it's then a cost multiplier.
A carbon tax is a good way to balance this, but man, people vote hard to not have to spend more of their own money. (I don't want to pay for it/I only want it if billionaires pay for it)
Even in those places, the cost of land is a small fraction of the cost of a PV installation.
Who are the current generation of climate activists backed and propagandized by?
Neither their policies nor their electorate support the idea that people like Jill Stein are in any way looked at as authorities in any "green" subject.
I don't think that someone that had national relevance for roughly half an election cycle, and who got less than half of one percent of the vote (at the peak of her popularity) has had any influence shaping nuclear opinions.
She's not even on record stating her position, that's how utterly unimportant this issue to Putin / Russia.
I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
It's not about any one person. You still see this now, where people suggest regulatory reform for the process of building new nuclear plants in the US to lower construction costs, people appear to tell you that nuclear costs too much and should be abandoned, i.e. they use circular logic to present the existence of the problem you're trying to solve as a reason not to try to address it.
The current line of reasoning is something like "solar plus storage is cheaper than nuclear so nuclear must never be attempted", which ignores both any possibility of improving the cost efficiency of nuclear and that the cost comparison they're using is for intra-day storage whereas nuclear also reduces the need for multi-day storage which is significantly more expensive.
> I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
Russia is a petroleum exporting country and petroleum is a global commodity. If the US (or anyone else) uses nuclear instead of fossil fuels then global demand for fossil fuels declines, US natural gas or coal producers instead sell to foreign customers who might have bought gas from Russia, etc.
Notice that the US oil industry has the same incentive. Exxon is very much aligned with Putin on this one and they have lobbyists too.
None of this detracts from the quality of the engineering, but it’s important to keep the motivation in view (whether to filter out the propaganda or to try and reproduce something like this at home).
Here's one example in Florida, but it is happening around the US https://www.eenews.net/articles/fla-solar-plans-stoke-fight-...
The net effect is a win for the fossil fuel industry and a weakened environmental movement.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-mount-vernon-frasier...
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
Solar production is seasonal, batteries to carry over seasons are beyond expensive.
Otherwise 10x your dinner solar to get winter solar and now it's not cheap.
If the public doesn't understand complex new thing X, and advocates for X have obviously told them all sorts of lies - yeah. Don't be surprised if the public becomes extremely skeptical about X.
Not creating nuclear power plants because you're afraid of some bombs is good reasoning?
What about the millions of deaths to fossil fuels every year? Are they better than the nuclear accidents we had?
I don't think good reasoning is why they felt that nuclear power was bad.
2. Operation is low-CO₂, but not low-risk Severe accidents are rare, but the consequences are catastrophic when they do occur. Chernobyl and Fukushima are obvious examples. The U.S. history is full of near misses, leaks, hardware failures, and human-factor problems. Calling such a technology “safe” glosses over systemic vulnerability.
3. Waste cannot be neutralised High-level waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. No human institution has ever maintained stable responsibility for anything even close to that timeframe. Most countries still rely on interim storage because final repositories are politically and technically unresolved.
4. Long-term burdens are externalised The benefits (electricity, profits, political narratives) are short-term and local. The harms (contamination, risk, millennia of monitoring) are long-term and imposed on future generations who cannot consent.
5. “Clean” becomes a marketing word In lifecycle terms—mining, fuel fabrication, plant construction, decommissioning, and waste storage—nuclear energy cannot be “clean” in any holistic sense. It is at best low-carbon but high-burden.
This doesn’t mean nobody can argue for nuclear energy, but it does mean that calling it clean is a simplification that hides very real costs and risks
Name them
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ford-warning-scientist...
You're telling me we don't have sci-fi energy harnessing capability to capture the nuclear energy itself and convert it to electricity?
It's 2025!
You have this insane device that produces a million degree hot ring of plasma and use it... to boil water...
Consider also how complex these reactors already are, it makes sense to use the simplest method that we know works well.
We start with detached electrons moving at high speeds (plasma). We want detached electrons moving at moderate speeds (electrical current). And yet, the intermediate steps involve everything from heat, steam, large-scale mechanical forces and magnetic induction, just to get back to the electrons?
It feels more like the "pull in a 500MB framework instead of writing the function yourself" kind of simplicity.
Essentially yes, but it's a function that has been continuously optimised by engineers for 200 years.
My take is that these folks can't accept that nobody is actually driving. It terrifies them to realize that we are all aboard a rudderless ship, so they imagine these secret cabals to be able to sleep at night.
Take COVID. There is insufficient proof that it was the result of lab work, but many many people prefer that warm fuzzy thought over acknowledging that mutating is just what viruses do, and always have done. Knowing that we're all one unlucky mutation away from grisly death is just too much for some folks. "It can't happen again, we shutdown that lab!"
To those people it has to be a nice, neat conspiracy. That way someone is in control, and if we just put those few villains in their place everyone will be safe from viruses, economic instabilty, immigrants, and the boogey man forever.
I agree the fears and subsequent responses are generally not warranted but to call it “bad faith” (by saying not in good faith) is not fair either. Some people are afraid and don’t understand it. We’ve all seen seen the disasters and communities impacted with higher rates of cancer even decades later as a direct result of the Manhattan Project. This stuff can be dangerous so it’s not meritless even if the reactions are wrong and generally uninformed.
People not engaging in good faith are doing it very deliberately.
There are only three civilian reactors >1MW in the US: at MIT, UC Davis, and the University of Missouri. You could also count the RINSC MTR, which is owned and operated by the Rhode Island state Atomic Energy Commission but located on the University of Rhode Island campus and collaborates closely with the university. Similarly, there are only two >1MW in Western Europe (TU Delft and TU München.)
If this sort of thing interests you, I can recommend reading about the history of the TRIGA. Freeman Dyson and Edward Teller designed it as a reactor “safe even in the hands of a young graduate student” and the US government sent them around the world as part of Atoms for Peace.
I looked it up and apparently we've had 3 or 4 different reactors on campus over the years, first one in 1950: https://nrp.ne.ncsu.edu/about/history/
I'd wager that even most NC State students don't know that it's there though.
The university got in trouble in the mid nineties for having buried nuclear waste as well as medical waste (cadavers) on a remote part of campus, but apparently that's not enough to put a Nuclear Reactor Laboratory out of business. Or a large university's medical system, of course.
Needless to say, that is no longer the case.
> And aside from a license renewal snafu in 1980, the device made no waves until its existence was shared with the local newspaper—it wasn’t a secret, just unpublicized.
If someone freaks out about it, it’s because they think you’re abusing normal, run of the mill product development secrecy, whether to develop a product that shouldn’t exist or to hide a practice that is never intended to be public and is just called secret to avoid scrutiny from an interested public (who, in this hypothetical scenario, feel that they have a right to be interested — think research into dangerous pathogens next to an unprotected public aquifer).
It sounds like there is no penalty to the nuclear labs except, if you blab to the wrong person, it’s going to stir up trouble.
I guess in this case the question comes down (for me) to whether employees at this lab were asked by their managers not to tell friends and acquaintances what they worked on. Even if not with an explicit threat of harm, asking someone not to tell something is pretty much exactly what asking them to keep it a secret means.
The objective is to avoid attention, not to be secret per se, though the effect can be similar.
Now CANDU reactors run on natural uranium. So they're forming metal pellets out of uranium powder. The main risk is direct chemical toxicity from the uranium, not the radiation. But for many people "nuclear fuel" might as well mean hot nuclear waste.
The mystical level of dread it inspires in some is hard to overstate. Just to avoid drama from the neighbours it's understandable they try to keep quiet.
Valar Atomics would like a word.
I often had to go to the basement there to store equipment, get equipment, etc.
The stuff I'd see down there was WILD. TONS of old movie/film paraphernalia in the form of posters, plaques with celluloid celebrating various movie releases, and tons of unmarked old film canisters. There was also a TON of old tech down there.
I used to joke that I felt like I was in that Hanger 51 warehouse from the end of Indiana Jones and The Ark of the Covenant.
It's a shame things went down as they did for Kodak. I really enjoyed those years I worked there. They used to make killer tuna melt paninis in their cafeteria area near the top of the tower and in the summer months I'd keep my car parked at work and just walk across the street to see the Rochester Red Wings play (AAA minor league baseball team).
https://news.ufl.edu/2025/10/uf-students-join-elite-ranks/
https://neup.inl.gov/infrastructure/university-research-reac...
My first guess was that the beam of Cf252-emitted neutrons, when it hits the U235, triggers new neutrons moving in the same direction, rather than in random directions. This would ensure that any tertiary neutrons would join the crowd and help the amplification while not just heating the system up.
Or, maybe that's the point? It's a not-quite-critical collection of U235 that is pushed even closer to criticality by the Cf252, multiplying the Cf232's neutron flux by "up to 30 times". But, if the U235 neutrons trigger the same emissions as the Cf252 neutrons, then wouldn't that require a razor's edge of criticality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium_neutron_flux_multi...
Yup. From the device description in its decommissioning plan:
The CFX was a sub-critical assembly of uranium-2-35 surrounding a Cf-252 source. The function of the U-235 fuel was to multiply the neutrons coming from the Cf-252 source, which fissions spontaneously. The CFX was designed never to exceed a Keff of 0.99. The CFX assembly yielded sufficient neutron fluxes for applications such as neutron activation analysis.
(... but it really isn't so interesting, so in order to keep the mystery, I'll simply not say what it is!)
> In 1975, Kodak powered up the country’s first californium neutron flux multiplier (CFX). Though it couldn’t live up to the sci-fi-tinged promise of its name
Why? It vanished! Nobody knows why or how.
They give tours, and if you're in the area, it's highly recommended. A great Boston-area date for the right kind of person.
Are they stupid at PM or just selling misinformation?
[0] https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Princip...