Wanna Hear What A Nuclear Reactor Sounds Like?

Here ya go!

Um no. Other than motor noises nukes make no sound. Unless of course they're exploding.

You need to turn in your geek card. You fail.

Yep, the only noise reactors make is from pumps / motors and running water.

So, what you're saying is that they're not completely silent. That if you're in the vicinity of one, you'll hear noise.

Oooh... pretty. Cherenkov radiation.

The point is, the actual nuclear fission reaction doesn't make any noise.

Yeah, so? Anybody here think that this thread is supposed to be a textbook discussion on nuclear reactors or nuclear fission? When somebody says that a person has "drunk the Kool-Aid" Do you immediately pop up with, "Actually, they drank Flavor-Aid at Jonestown."? Or do you get the gist of what they were saying and that the detail of which particular drink they swallowed was irrelevant to the topic at hand?

So, I was initially replying to Steve, not you, Mr. High-Strung.

I thought it was about "what a nuclear reactor sounds like." The video maker obviously added sound that he thought would sound cool. And you fell for it.

Cool thing about that...

In 1945, a criticality accident involving a plutonium bomb core (later dubbed "the demon core" for its role in two fatal accidents) occurred when physicist Louis Slotin inadvertently allowed a neutron reflector to close on the core, starting a brief chain reaction.

The people present in the room saw a bright blue flash at the instant criticality occurred, but the flash was not a visible phenomenon in the room.

It was Cerenkov radiation being emitted from the aqueous humor in their own eyes, from particles passing through it.

So ... they had cameras or some other sort of surveillance in the room and has been verified that no visible flash was seen?

Weird. That would be cool to have experienced it. Maybe. Has there been any follow up with the people in the room that experienced the flash and had any lingering adverse affects?

Cerenkov radiation--that characteristic blue light you see in the reactor videos above--is produced when particles pass through water at a speed faster than light. (Note: this does not contradict relativity, as the speed of light in water is slower than it is in a vacuum.)

So, a camera would not have recorded a blue glow, but everyone in the room would've seen it...even with their eyes closed. The glow was coming from inside their own eyes!

The same thing happens with astronauts in low Earth orbit. They will occasionally see a small flash in their vision when a very energetic charged particle passes through their eyeball. It happens at a far lower rate than in the criticality accident, so is safe for much longer periods of time.

Slotin, standing right next to the core, died horrifically of radiation poisoning some days afterward. Of the seven others in the room, all had varying degrees of radiation-induced illness.

According to Wikipedia...

There was another criticality accident during the Manhattan Project that killed physicist Harry Daghlian. It involved the same plutonium core in the Slotin accident, which is how it got the nickname "the Demon Core." The core was probably somewhat degraded from the two accidents and so was melted down and recycled into other bomb cores.

In the film Fat Man and Little Boy, John Cusack plays a fictional character who dies in an accident that is a dramatic mash-up of Slotin's and Daghlian's.

ok. So, not cool to experience. noted.

Yes, if you see that pretty blue flash, it probably means, at a minimum, you're going to be in the hospital for a few weeks. And if you were standing close to the source...

Or in short, Cherenkov Radiation is like a shockwave when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.

Yes, it's often described that way. Except a shockwave is a phenomenon in matter, Cerenkov is an electromagnetic effect.