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.
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 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.
The objective is to avoid attention, not to be secret per se, though the effect can be similar.
> 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).
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.
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...
Valar Atomics would like a word.
Are they stupid at PM or just selling misinformation?
[0] https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Princip...