Nuclear Science Center at WSU expands skills in rapidly growing – and eerily glowing – field | Local

Thanks to a steady influx of grants over the past few years, Washington State University’s Nuclear Science Center has acquired a range of state-of-the-art equipment that greatly expands its research capabilities.

Located in the school’s Dodgen Research Facility on the northeastern edge of campus, the center is a hub for scientific collaboration at WSU as well as the unlikely home of an operational nuclear reactor.

NSC director Corey Hines said grants from the US Department of Energy and other sources have allowed the center to purchase a variety of new instruments as they have become a kind of one-stop shop for all nuclear issues.

Hines said that in the past three years alone, the facility has set up a fully equipped thermochemistry lab, purchased a new X-ray diffractometer for analyzing the atomic structure of a material, and a freezer-sized spectroscopy device called the XAFS. The center will also house a new small-angle X-ray scattering device (SAXS) by the end of next year.

These instruments represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, Hines said.

Liane Moreau, assistant professor and researcher at WSU, said that these types of instruments are few and far between. The closest SAXS is in Berkeley, California. Hence, having access to them in a facility is a great benefit for researchers.

She said that normally to use equipment like an XAFS or SAXS for her research, she would have to go through a lengthy application process for relatively restricted access, while at Pullman she will be able to conduct the same experiments without leaving the building.

She said having access to this type of equipment in the same facility as a nuclear reactor is a particularly unique privilege.

“Let’s say we created a material with the nuclear reactor, we can then look at it directly in our instruments here, so that we have capabilities that we have nowhere else,” said Moreau of the SAXS. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no other instrument in the world that actually exists in the same facility as a nuclear reactor.”

According to Moreau, there are also major challenges involved in shipping and transporting radioactive material, and having access to these machines in one location eliminates the need to move the material from place to place in many cases.

Hines said the equipment available at the center, including the reactor, can be helpful in a variety of research disciplines.

For the researchers, Hines said, it is the NSC’s job to enable faculty members to safely and effectively conduct nuclear-related research, with specialized staff they can rely on for assistance. He said the center was being operated as a “user facility”.

“So in addition to the reactor and everything that goes on there, we’re getting chemistry, engineering, and materials science faculty members to settle in this facility to do all of their radiology (and) nuclear work, the” We can help, ”said Hines. “They have built-in staff with decades of experience handling these materials, our staff can conduct experiments (and) we can help write grants.”

The reactor room itself has a quiet drama. The core, which sits at the bottom of a deep, calm pool, gives off an eerie blue science fiction glow. The calm of the display belies the breathtaking power that the nucleus generates through nuclear fission – the scientific cutting of an atomic nucleus. As the WSU website notes, burning a carbon molecule can produce around four electron volts of energy, while splitting just one atom by splitting produces 200,000,000 electron volts.

Research project engineer and chief reactor operator Maddison Heine said a recent virtual tour of middle school students looked at what the water that isolates the core might taste like. Boring, she guessed.

While the core generates a tremendous amount of energy, it is not used to power the electrical grid. Hines said the reactor will be used primarily for teaching, research and the production of radioisotopes.

He said the center’s services support “everything from the medical side of things, which uses diagnostic radiation therapy on a daily basis, to the next generation of reactor fuels proposed that people are working on, to the material side of things.” said Hines said. “There are many different questions and the role of the (Nuclear) Science Center staff is to make this discovery possible.”