Olympic stadium site once used to house a nuclear reactor

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 5:59 pm

[ Community -> Article ]

The site for the new Olympic stadium in London has some dark history - it was once used to house an experimental nuclear reactor.

Fortunately for the athletes, the reactor was the size of a bucket and generated almost no energy, and used for undergraduate (giant ants?) and post-graduate (giant ants for the army?) college experiments. The college campus was moved in the 80's, and the reactor was decomissioned.

Spotted @ BBC

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:27 pm

There's a nuclear reactor in the engineering building at my friend's school. One day, during winter break, me and him went up there to get some stuff from his apartment, and upon hearing that there was a reactor, I insisted he show it to me. I figured I'd just see the building or whatever, but nope. We walked right in, right up to the reactor room itself. No real security, no people. The reactor was pretty small. Bigger than this bucket sized thing, but still small compared to what people picture when they think of nuclear power plants. It powered the whole campus, and I guess parts of the city, so you can probably imagine.

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:38 pm

What city was that?

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:45 pm

WPI in Worcester.

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:51 pm

Schools having nuclear reactors for experiments? We had nothing except magnesium bars and vinegar dumb

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:59 pm

It's college though.
My experiments ended up in burning two holes in backyard grass with acid, and killing some grass with chlorine gas. Dad was pissed dumb

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 8:41 pm

It's actually pretty common, from what I've heard.

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 9:39 pm

McGill here in Montreal used to have a kickass cyclotron in some dark basement. They had to get rid of it, but I think there's still a good one at Universite de Montreal.

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 1:22 am

I used to live less than 4 miles from a nuclear reactor. It was decomissioned about a decade ago. One of the sadest days of my life was the day I learned they were cutting the VC up into itty-bitty pieces.

One day I found in the town garage the 50+ year old map of ground zero and the various kill-zones.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 7:01 pm

This is kind of digging up an old topic, but just to clarify on this one: WPI's nuclear reactor was designed for its nuclear engineering program, and since that program was nixed some years back, the reactor has been offline. Rumors give it varying amounts of power output ranging from enough for a few 75W bulbs to glow, to enough to assist in powering a building or two. The official capable output (from a proffessor who had worked with it), it was only capable of running a dozen or so computers.
But sure, if anyone wants to look at it, nice lil' door with a thick window through which you can look in at the top of it! (ooo a 10 foot round metal capsule sticking out of the floor!...not nearly as cool as the big ones =\ )
WPI keeps it 'running' (although offline) just because decomishioning costs so much.
Supposedly Worcester had a nice nuke pointed at it once upon a time, though i dont remember the specifics, if it was before or after the installation of the reactor, several other low-key as well as high profile (Nortons) manufacturers of military and industrial parts were here at the time, so it might not have been.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 9:08 pm

It's actually pretty common, from what I've heard.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 10:36 pm

So there is s steam turbine and a power transmission setup in the reactor building?

Or is it magic.

Like you just plug a wire into the reactor thingy.

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 1:06 am

Well, apparently my friend was being an ass when he said it powered the campus, as evidenced by a few posts up.

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 2:26 pm

I hope you'll make him feel like an ass, too.