Life on the Atomic Scale

Have you ever been to the southwest corner of the University of New Mexico campus? Have you noticed the ominous looking cement buildings with narrow windows, or the windowless cube with the 1950s art deco lettering that simply says “Nuclear Engineering”? To some these buildings may look uninviting and could even be described as an eyesore. However, these buildings are home to a group of students, who when they hear the word Heisenberg, don’t necessarily think about the hit AMC drama Breaking Bad, but rather the uncertainty principle in which a strange and wonderful quantum world is tied to. These students operate a nuclear reactor right on campus. They learn about radiation and electronics by playing with exotic sounding elements like Plutonium and Promethium. They are Nuclear Engineering students, and no, we are not all about making bombs.But what drives someone to become a Nuclear Engineer? What is it like to be in the Nuclear community? At the heart of every engineer is the desire for improvement. We want to take what exists and make it better. We are not content when someone tells us the end result of something; we want to know how and why it works and how it might be improved. We view the world through a lens of mathematical equations and logic. As student Lindsey Tafoya describes,

“The engineer holds an important place in the ecosystem, as its activity makes the environment safer and more productive for itself as well as the organisms around it. It creates new and better approaches to problems, which are then slowly assimilated by creatures throughout the environment (Tafoya).”

As for the community, some may describe us as shy or anti-social, but this is not the case. We tend to use each other as a form of support system, offering help and leaning on each other so that we can all make it through our grueling coursework. It really feels like being part of a family.

How do we communicate with each other to achieve our goals? If you hang around long enough, you may think that Nuclear Engineering students are speaking another language. Conversations usually revolve around certain atoms or isotopes, descriptions and arguments could be in English or mathematical language and you may laugh at some of the names of units that we use. While engineers in general have usually been described by outsiders as nerdy and geeky, Nuclear Engineers are no exception. To a Nuke-E, as we call ourselves for short, these terms would be compliment! We tell some good jokes too. A common saying in the community is “Never trust an atom, they make up everything!”

In engineering, it is important that we all speak the same language because there are many subtleties that could lead to issues. For example, in 1999 NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used English units of measurement while another team used metric system. In normal terms that is akin to someone who speaks English trying to communicate with someone who speaks Russian. What you needed was simply a translator. Part of becoming an engineer is to be introduced to the language commonly used to communicate. One of the first things you are introduced to are the many different systems of measurement used. Metric is one common one. Many people in the United States have some experience with it, but mostly it is used in other countries and the scientific community. It is arguably a simpler system than what we use in the U.S., but most Americans do not have an intuitive feel for the units. We think in pounds and miles, not kilograms and kilometers. We use these units to describe things like length and weight. While the distance from my house to the store doesn’t change, describing the length in miles is different than describing the length kilometers. To move between systems you simply need unit conversion factors which act like a “translator”. For example, there is about 1.6 kilometers in a mile. In the case of the NASA mishap, this simple translation was not performed and the consequence of this was expensive.

To further illustrate how the language within the Nuclear Engineering community differs from the outside world, we can play a game of word association. I’ll say a word and you’ll think the first thing that pops into your head. I will then explain what the first thing that pops into a Nuke-E’s head would be. Ready?

Barn

Non-Engineer: A large building you might find on a farm.

Nuclear Engineer: A unit of measurement that is equal to 1x10^-24 cm²

Seems like an odd way to define a unit, but the lore behind where this unit came from is interesting. In physical terms this unit is extremely small. Smaller than an atom. Smaller than the nucleus of an atom even! It is used to describe the affinity of an atom’s nucleus to interact with an outside neutron. A neutron is part of what makes up the nucleus as a whole. The units are length squared, which is an area. In a simple case, a Nuclear Engineer is concerned with an atom’s ability to absorb a neutron to cause an event like fission (the process we take advantage of to extract energy and create power in a nuclear reactor). If you have heard the phrase “You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn”, the unit may start to make sense. In an almost sarcastic way, some engineer decided that the way to talk about an impossibly tiny neutron hitting an impossibly small nucleus would be best served in units of barns.

Rad

Non-Engineer: An expression that describes something favorable or cool.

Nuclear Engineer: A unit used to describe how much energy from radiation is absorbed by some mass.

Gray

Non-Engineer: A color

Nuclear Engineer: A unit similar to Rad that applies to absorbed dose of radiation

Mole

Non-Engineer: A pesky pest that digs holes in your yard

Nuclear Engineer: A quantity that is equal to 6.022x10²⁴

The list could go on. These are just a very few examples of some of the different meanings of words you might encounter in the Nuclear Engineering world.

So what’s the big deal about all these funny units and interesting language used by Nuclear Engineers? As students, part of our responsibility is learning the terminology and how to appropriately apply these terms. From a big picture perspective, the implications and use of this language are vast. Nuclear Engineers are largely responsible for things like Nuclear power plants that provide energy to the world or to submarines and aircraft carriers that protect our nation. Nuclear Engineers are involved in designing and improving medical devices like PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners that help diagnose and treat illnesses to improve quality of life. Nuclear Engineers use terms like barns to talk about neutron absorption cross sections in order to design equipment that can detect the presence of dangerous material (weapons) that may be used by terrorists. All of these things are important to everyone and it all starts with the language we learn in school to describe the systems and concepts needed to design and build an improved tomorrow.

Citations:

Tafoya, Lindsey. Personal Interview. 16 Oct 2013.

Images:

Erdmann, Bryan. Nuclear Engineering Lab. 2012. Photograph. n.p. Web. 4 Nov 2013.

World View. N.d. Graphic. Abstruse GooseWeb. 4 Nov 2013. <http://abstrusegoose.com/275>.

Nuclear Power Plant. 2007. Graphic. 45 Nuclear PlantsWeb. 4 Nov 2013. <http://www.45nuclearplants.com/nuclear_reactor_designs.asp>.