The Blog

 So tired...

All I wanted to do today was get that stupid 3rd section of the paper written. I've still got about three paragraphs to go, but at 5pm I realised there was a terrible mistake in my plots, so I had to re-derive the equations and then redraw those instead. But at least I'm still likely to get it done before my meeting with the boss on Wednesday.

But to show I care, here's the uni's Christmas message, complete with snow and talk of the recession.

Labels: club mac, linking all over the place, never going to graduate, thesis ftl, writing

400 posts later...

I guess I'm doing okay with this blogging thing. Well, sorta. It has been what, nearly 7 years since I started, so I guess I'm averaging about one post a week or something. I'm very slack, but I muddle through.

Anyway, there's so much to talk about, to bring you up to speed on all I've done these last few weeks. So let's stop feeling nostalgic and get on with stuff. I have a feeling that it might spill over into a second post, because life is kinda like that and I'd rather just post something instead of leaving it in draft mode forever.

Friday 30/1/9 — The Nuclear Reactor Trip

As promised, the other Friday I got to visit ANSTO at Lucas Heights (the only suburb in Sydney that does not contain any residential areas). The entirety of the newly rebranded Faculty of Science at the University was invited, and there was nothing on the application form that said postgrad students weren't allowed along, so I put my name down and they deigned to let me tag along (I guess there was nothing exciting in my ASIO file after all). As it turns out, I was the only PhD student from physics who wanted to go, which was a huge disappointment to me (guys, it's a nuclear reactor!), but the boss was there to keep me company, and he's good fun.

Friday morning at the crack of 9, a miscellaneous bunch of academics, postdocs, and the odd postgrad student (hey, at least I'm honest) piled onto a bus, and most of them started doing paperwork. The latest round of research grant applications were due that afternoon, and the Dean was sitting behind us talking about the restructure and passing notes with one of his administrators, I think, while at least one postdoc was writing his latest paper. Some of the retired members of faculty were backseat driving (I almost agree with them that taking the bus through the city was the wrong way to go, but there wasn't any traffic and I wasn't paying for using the toll roads, so who knows), and the boss only brought a water bottle with him, so he mostly stared out the window as we travelled South, breaking his stare occasionally to gossip with me, and plot a little about out .

We got to the visitor's centre, where they checked all of our identification against a check list to make sure that we had been cleared by the anti-terrorist hotline, then they told us that we weren't allowed to take anything with us. No phones, no cameras (hence the lack of photos), no handbags, no keychains that could possibly be used as a weapon or device for sawing through network cables (as they once let in someone with a baby keychain Swiss Army Knife and they did that, crazy bastard), although you may have one small notepad and a pen (so long as it's not mighter than a sword). You could keep your wallet if it fit in your pockets (ie you were a boy).

We were escorted back to the bus, and we met our hosts for the day: one wacky mostly-retired physicist, and an educator clearly more used to dealing with the general public than a pack of curious scientists. One was a better guide than the other, simply because he didn't have the physics knowledge to answer our basic questions and so he fetched the experts to chat to us about it all. The other tried to answer our questions as he would those of the general public, and thus he kinda missed the point in most situations. When a scientist asks something complicated, explaining what a neutron is won't help.

Anyway, our first destination (after a boring introduction to how universities and the reactor people can get along fabulously if they try) was the reactor itself. To get there the bus had to stop at a security checkpoint where the road was blocked by a heavy sliding gate, at which a solid-looking and well-armed member of the Australian Federal Police boarded us and barked questions about whether or not we were carrying knives or explosives. No one dared to answer incorrectly, though one person worried enough to get their keyring checked out (it was acceptable).

When he was pleased with our responses he jumped down again and the gate slowly moved out of the way to let the bus through. Then we ran up the hill and down many roads labelled for famous scientists and along to this building. The curved building is the visitor/tour centre, the big hall is the main instrument building, and the one that's topped by the metal crosshatching (known to the locals as the "Cessna Shredder") houses OPAL itself. It's a rather attractive piece of architecture, and I'm told that while it was designed in early 2001 before anyone seriously considered throwing large jets at buildings, it will likely also destroy the fuselage of any jumbo jet as well as the entirely of a Cessna.

My group got to visit the instrument hall first, which was full of boxes for the guiding of neutrons from the reactor into various neutron scattering experiments. I won't go into the gory details, but suffice to say one can study the inner details of atomic structures by bombarding them with neutrons. Among other things they can test the propellor blades of aircraft for defect, testing new softer plastics for contact lenses and some odd stuff involve the surfaces of liquids that I didn't quite follow but I want to learn more about.

We were allowed to venture outside of the little viewing room into the upper level of the hall itself, where one could hear the whirr of machinery and we could properly see the large light with the words "reactor is *on*" on it. This was much more fun, as we got to walk around further, and see that downstairs near the neutron guides there were signs saying "no loitering, high radiation in this area" and designated 'safe' walkways for staff members to use. The reactor runs 340 days of the year, so it's important not to stray off the paths more than strictly necessary, I imagine.

Curiously, in one of the brochures I picked up it said that staff at the reactor over the last 50 years had lower than average death rates in all the major categories (which includes cancer, presumably). But still, high radiation doses are to be avoided, kids!

All of the detectors within the hall were named for Australian animals, rather than acronyms that indicate their purpose. The boss of that part of the place told us it was because all of the acronyms proposed by staff ended up indication rather too much about their feelings for management, and weren't exactly safe for work. *grins*

After this, we went to visit OPAL itself. Sadly we were told that the group we had brought was too large, and we wouldn't get to visit the top of the reactor pool after all (not that we would have made it onto the bridge, but a viewing platform up there). This was a great disappointment, and even worse was the realisation that we were going to be stuck in the visitor's centre, where the most exciting thing to see was a scale model with lots of LEDs to indicate the different aspects of the building (like the backup power supplies). Thrilling stuff, but not a nuclear reactor.

In the far corner there was a display with a sample fuel rod (obviously not with real uranium in it), which was kinda cool. One of the reasons the reactor's so safe (and I wasn't worried being there) was that in case of emergency or blackout, the motors holding the rods in the pool will fail and they will drop under the influence of gravity into a shielded hole, causing all the reactions to stop. I haven't explained it very well, but it's really rather clever.

And as a sad consolation, there was a webcam pointed at the reactor. Our tour guide didn't really do a good job of showing us around the image, but it was glowing blue with Cherenkov radiation, which meant it was operational. I wished to know more about it, what it was working on (was it making radioisotopes for medicine or just producing neutrons for the devices out back?) and things like that, but the guide couldn't answer our questions. Most interestingly, one of the main reasons for having a reactor so close to Sydney is that they can make radioisotopes with a half life of 6 hours (in six hours, half of the radioactive material will have decayed, so it's out of your system quickly), but other places in Australia have to settle for lesser isotopes with longer half-lives because it takes more than 6 hours to ship them there, as in the case of Perth. I still don't really like nuclear power plants on principle, but sadly, I think they've won me over, because it is rather useful in the right places, like science. But no one really wants to hear my greeny politics now.

We piled back onto the bus, and were taken back outside the gates to the main cafeteria for lunch, which certainly didn't taste radioactive. It was somewhat weird to sit with the academics for lunch, to hear the professors gossiping like schoolgirls. It turns out that one of them was recently at his apartment in New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, and just recently he had had difficulty sleeping a night because a police boat all bedecked in lights was parked directly above a sunken aeroplane engine. Aside from that, they mostly spoke of university politicking.

Back onto the bus after lunch, and through the security gauntlet once more, we went to visit the particle accelerators. The first one was really interesting, a particular device that they use for things like carbon dating, where with only 5 micro grams of a sample they can work out the Carbon-14 content. They're using it for a lot of atmospheric studies, looking at the methane and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere over the last many thousands of years using ice cores from Antarctica. The long and short of it is that the methane levels in our atmosphere currently are the highest of anything they've studied, and it's a much worse source of global warming than carbon dioxide.

At this point all the earth science people were really excited, I think they'd like to use the accelerator for dating their samples too, especially as you don't need to send very much off to get a good result. That particular type of accelerator destroys the sample, as they ionise it and then send it all whooshing around at high speed to sort the particles by atomic weight.

The one we went to see next didn't destroy the sample, but it was more used like the neutron scattering experiments, only using beams of rapidly moving charged particles to probe crystal structures and the like. It can't probe as closely because the nuclear charge repels the ions, but it's cheaper and easier to get time on it, I suspect, and it has other strengths, I'm sure. The problem was we were back with the old physicist who didn't know how to answer our questions. The other thing in that hall was a decommissioned old nuclear reactor that was gradually going to be demolished, but again, no questions were answered. *pouts*

Gradually the group dispersed throughout the hall to read the posters scattered on the walls, as the guide was so mind-numbingly boring that no one cared enough to be polite, save for a few postgrad students who weren't me. Eventually we were rescued by someone who announced that we were running late and it was time to leave, so we all piled onto the bus again, stopped to pick up some bookmarks as souvenirs and all of our bags and then we left the ANSTO facility.

Nothing exciting happened on the way back save that we drove through Bankstown and some awesome soul (not me) convinced the driver to do a dropoff there. Funnily enough I approved of that, and made my way home in a surprisingly short period of time.

So, that was my day at the nuclear reactor. I'm sorry the storytelling took so long to write up, but I promise I'll do some more blogging soon.

Oh, one more thing

I can confirm the whole I have whooping cough thing now. Joy. I'm on antibiotics that need to be taken every six hours without fail, and I usually sleep for eight hours... *sighs* Oh, and now, after a month, my mum has decided not to let me use the family phone anymore.

Labels: club mac, linking all over the place, nuclear physics, Radioactive-Cat, science, sickly-Cat, stupid blogs, whooping cough