Nuclear squeeze

Pssssssst . . . there's a nuclear reactor in Cambridge. City residents voted this month to shut it down, but its owner, MIT, says absolutely not.

by Jason Gay

One hundred thirty-eight Albany Street is an inconspicuous brick building off Mass Ave in Cambridge, connected to a tall red smokestack and what looks to be an oil tank. The building's neighbors include an antiques shop, the NECCO candy factory, and a nightclub called the Paradise. The Charles River is less than half a mile away. On the building's front door is a small sign, which reads:

NUCLEAR REACTOR LABORATORY
NUCLEAR ENGINEERING DEPT.

This black-and-white sign is the only clear indication of the activity taking place inside. If you drove past the facility and missed the sign, you'd have no reason to suspect that there was nuclear research going on behind those plain brick walls. Nor would you be likely to guess that the pale blue dome that looks like an oil tank isn't really an oil tank, but an honest-to-goodness nuclear reactor -- five megawatts, a baby compared to the silos found at power plants.

Believe it or not, the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory has been here for more than 40 years, within walking distance of dormitories, frat parties, and hangouts such as the Middle East nightclub. Known as a "research reactor," the lab is one of more than 30 such facilities at American colleges and universities. (A similar one-megawatt reactor resides at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.) MIT's reactor has been active for nearly all of its four decades, save for a two-year renovation in the early 1970s, and it has been used by some extremely accomplished scientists, including one Nobel Prize winner.

But that doesn't mean everyone knows about MIT's li'l reactor. Step off the campus and you'll find many people who are totally unaware of their nuclear neighbor. "A good number of people don't know," says David O'Connor, Cambridge's director of emergency management, who monitors the reactor's safety for the city. "A lot of people who have lived in Cambridge all of their lives don't know there's a reactor right there."

The MIT reactor: Assessing the fear The MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, which resides at 138 Albany Street, in Cambridge, holds a nonpower research reactor, one of more than 40 such reactors in the United States. Debuted in June 1958, the reactor is used for medical and educational studies by researchers from dozens of area universities and health care facilities. Because the MIT reactor sits in a busy residential and business district -- right off Mass Ave, within walking distance of both Central and Kendall Squares -- it makes some Cambridge residents uneasy. Last month, voters in the 28th Middlesex District voted to ask their state representative to help move the reactor out of the city. MIT responds that its reactor is extremely safe and poses no threat to the surrounding community. School officials point out that the reactor runs at just five megawatts, much less than reactors at commercial power plants. The Pilgrim power plant in Plymouth, for example, boasts a 670-megawatt reactor. In addition, the water in the MIT reactor's core is kept at atmospheric pressure at a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius -- basically, hot bath water. By comparison, the water inside commercial reactor cores is usually kept at several hundred degrees Celsius and at substantially higher pressures. What this means, school officials say, is that the MIT reactor is not only smaller than a commercial power reactor but doesn't experience the heightened temperatures, pressures, and other stresses that have occasionally led to accidents elsewhere. "The type of accident you can get at a power plant isn't going to happen here," says the MIT lab's director, John Bernard. But those assurances don't satisfy Cambridge political activist David Hoicka, who led the drive to put the Move the Nuke referendum on this month's ballot. Hoicka wants the MIT reactor shut down or moved to a more rural location. "I don't want to say scary things, but I don't think anyone can say there will never be a mistake," Hoicka says of the reactor.

Understandably, when people find out there's a nuke in the 'hood, they are usually concerned. Despite the MIT reactor's unblemished safety record, it's fair to say that nuclear power still has the ability to, well, freak people out. This fall, an MIT grad and political activist named David Hoicka managed to place a referendum on the ballot in Cambridge's 28th Middlesex District, asking the neighborhood's state representative to help get the reactor out of the city. On November 3, residents overwhelmingly approved Hoicka's referendum, 5791 votes to 2889.

"The responsible thing for MIT is to move the reactor out of this densely populated area and into a rural one," Hoicka says.

But MIT says no dice -- it's not moving its reactor anywhere. Regardless of the referendum vote, school officials say, the state has no authority over nuclear facilities. What's more, they charge Hoicka with grossly misrepresenting the reactor's activities.

In fact, MIT was so unimpressed with Hoicka's arguments that officials didn't bother responding to his ballot-question campaign. "We decided it was so off the wall that it wasn't worth talking about," says John Bernard, the long-time director of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory.

But through its silence, MIT lost a neighborhood vote. Though Hoicka's Move the Nuke campaign hasn't exactly ignited the city, his referendum's success means that nuclear politics -- in hibernation for most of the 1990s -- are back on the public agenda in Cambridge. Where things go from here is anyone's guess. This, after all, is a city where cab drivers have PhDs and chess players outside Au Bon Pain have opinions about atomic energy. And whether MIT responds to the referendum or not, the November vote has had one unquestioned result: some people are finding out what goes on inside 138 Albany Street for the very first time.

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Accidents can happen, David Hoicka argues. Over the years, he's heard plenty of times that the MIT reactor is too small to cause a major nuclear disaster -- but, he asks, how can the university be so sure something bad won't happen? What promise does MIT give that a nuclear mishap or malfunction won't result in a doomsday by the Charles, with Cantabrigians scrambling for cover?

"No one can guarantee that it's impossible for a human or computer error [to lead to] the radioactive contamination of Cambridge," says Hoicka. "If there is even a small amount of nuclear contamination, it could cause loss and harm for hundreds of thousands of people."

Hoicka, 44, is a dedicated Cambridge rabble-rouser, and, if nothing else, he knows how to stir people up. A long-time housing attorney, the gray-and-black-haired activist is well known for his spirited rants at city council meetings, and for grassroots efforts such as his anti-gentrification campaign Save Central Square. Twice, including this year, Hoicka has run for state representative in the 28th Middlesex District, which stretches from the east side of Harvard Square to the MIT campus. Twice, Hoicka has lost.

But Hoicka has his followers, and his issues. Over the years, he'd heard his Central Square neighbors complain about the MIT reactor's being so close to their homes. People would drive past late at night and see the parking-lot gates wide open, with no visible security around. Residents occasionally complained to the school only to be stonewalled by the administration, Hoicka says. "We have a lot of strange-looking mosquitoes and bugs around here, and we'd wonder if it had something to do with the nuclear plant," he says, laughing. For the most part, however, the reactor debate remained "under the surface" in Cambridge, he says.

Determined to do something, Hoicka made a Move the Nuke referendum a major part of his latest state-representative campaign. He hands over a brochure. MIT SAYS ITS CAMBRIDGE NUCLEAR REACTOR IS 'PERFECTLY SAFE,' reads the front cover, which includes a photograph of 138 Albany Street. Inside, below the headline OTHER 'PERFECTLY SAFE' TECHNOLOGICAL MARVELS, are photographs of the Three Mile Island power plant, Chernobyl, the space shuttle Challenger, and the Titanic.

Dramatic? You bet. Hoicka says he mailed and handed out more than 20,000 of these brochures this summer. Most of the people he encountered had never heard of MIT's reactor, he says. "Some of them said they thought it was a tank for the NECCO factory, to hold chocolate syrup and stuff."

Hoicka, who has MIT degrees in architecture and civil engineering, doesn't pretend to be an expert in nuclear science. He's toured MIT's reactor only once. He's also prone to making leading statements about the nuclear-research program -- "I think they are getting paid to do some experiments that they can't talk about," he says, flashing a Cheshire-cat grin -- without supplying any further information or clarification. A line in his brochure states that "[o]ne MIT student said the reactor was used for making bombs," but it does not give the name of the student or the date when he or she allegedly made the comment.

What Hoicka does know, however, is that nuclear reactors scare people. Indeed, it doesn't take a nuclear scientist to figure out why his ballot question -- Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation requiring that the Nuclear Reactor presently operating in Cambridge on Albany Street near Mass Ave. and MIT, be removed forthwith out of Cambridge to a safer and less densely populated area -- passed by nearly a two-to-one margin. It's likely that the majority of Cambridge residents walked into the voting booth, saw the words Cambridge and nuclear, and voted to move the reactor out of town.

As understandable as that reaction may have been, however, the referendum caught some people by surprise. "I thought it was unusual," says Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regional office in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, which oversees the MIT reactor. "You don't see too many calls to move research reactors. For the most part, they don't get much attention."

Indeed, the reactor isn't even on the radar screen of some nuclear-watchdog groups. Massachusetts Citizens for Safe Energy, which monitors commercial power plants such as Plymouth's Pilgrim, doesn't have any position on the MIT reactor. Neither does the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national nuke-watch organization based in Cambridge. "We focus on operating, commercial nuclear plants . . . we haven't looked at research reactors in sufficient detail," says UCS representative David Lockbaum.

Jarrett Barrios, the 28th District's state representative-elect -- and the man now charged with pushing legislation to move the reactor -- says he hadn't thought the facility was much of an issue to his constituents, who are preoccupied largely with issues of affordable housing, education, and taxes.

"I talked to close to 3000 people in this district at their doors," Barrios says, recalling his state-rep campaign. "And two people raised this issue as a concern."

Still, Barrios says he'll now investigate the MIT reactor and the options for the neighborhood. "The plant is in my district, and I take seriously my neighbors' concerns about this. I will learn more about it," he says.

A few minutes later, Barrios calls back. He's phoned MIT and made an appointment for a reactor tour.

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The MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory isn't exactly a secret. In fact, getting in to see the reactor is a lot easier than, say, getting a Friday-night table at Mistral. You just call up, ask, and go.

In fact, MIT seems determined to have the cuddliest little nuclear reactor around. The lab's director, John Bernard -- a tall, broad-shouldered scientist who has been at the facility since 1974 -- emphasizes that the facility is open for tours, the majority of which he leads himself. More than a thousand people visit the facility each year, he says, most of them fellow scientists but a good number of schoolchildren as well.

The idea of the tours, clearly, is to demystify the reactor to the public. "I think the [referendum] vote would have been different if people knew what this reactor does," Bernard says.

Still, touring a nuclear reactor isn't like visiting a petting zoo. At the start, all guests are equipped with pen-size pocket dosimeters -- devices used to measure any unwanted radiation they may collect during the tour. They are told not to touch anything without asking first. The tour I went on marked the first time I have ever been asked to submit myself to a Geiger counter or encountered a GRAVE DANGER -- HIGH RADIATION AREA sign.

Guests enter the MIT reactor by passing through an air-lock chamber, an experience that feels a bit like riding a slow elevator. The facility's main room, where the nuclear reactor lies, is a large, open space, painted pale blue and surrounded by catwalks and various gadgets from decades gone by. (You can't help but feel a tad nostalgic for the Cold War. I half-expected to find Austin Powers-style karate-kicking enemies in lab coats, or at least a missile or two pointed at BU.)

Bernard, however, is quick to dismiss any sinister speculation about the activities at 138 Albany Street. "There has never been any military research here of any kind," the lab director says categorically.

What does go on at the MIT Nuclear Laboratory, Bernard says, is medical and educational research. According to information supplied by the university's news office, current research projects use the reactor to treat rheumatoid arthritis, study air pollution, and examine meteorites and volcanic lava.

The biggest study now under way at the reactor involves a procedure known as boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), in which neutron beams are used to treat brain cancer. Patients, some of whom have come from overseas, are brought into a sealed room on the reactor's first floor (where a Monet water-lily painting adorns the wall), and researchers focus a beam onto an exposed part of their brain. It is an extremely delicate, last-resort procedure for these patients, who cannot be treated with traditional methods.

BNCT was tried first in the 1950s, with disappointing results; patients received doses of radiation that were either too low or too high, and they died from the cancer or from the effects of the neutron beam itself. But the current research -- conducted jointly with Beth Israel-New England Deaconess Hospital and funded largely by the US Department of Energy -- features a modified procedure. The early results are promising, says Paul Busse, associate chairman of the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy at Harvard, who is the study's leader.

"One of the things that make this reactor unique is the intellectual expertise of the MIT people," says Busse. "They really are head and shoulders above everyone else."

MIT's reactor, though, isn't really unique. There are more than 40 non-power generating research reactors in the United States -- most of them at schools, including UMass Lowell, Cornell, and state universities in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. There are government-run nonpower reactors at the US Geological Survey in Denver and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. There are private ones owned by corporations such as General Electric and Dow. And there are several reactors in urban locations -- for example, the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, and Manhattan College, in the Bronx.

MIT's research reactor, however, is one of the oldest in the US -- and one of the best-known. For years, one of the scientists using the facility was Clifford G. Shull, a renowned physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his discoveries about the atomic structures of liquids and solids. (Shull's Nobel, which he shared with Bertram Brockhouse of Canada, was actually awarded for work he and colleagues had done 40 years earlier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.)

"Overall, we consider it [MIT] to be a solid program," says the NRC's Sheehan. "In fact, it's one of the premier ones in the country."

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Yet no matter how impressive the program's scientific reputation, MIT acknowledges that when nuclear energy is involved, the public's biggest concern is always going to be safety.

On this front, the school stresses that its reactor, which doesn't generate electricity, is much smaller than a typical power reactor and uses far less fuel -- at five megawatts, it's a speck compared to reactors like the one at Plymouth's Pilgrim power plant, which runs at 670 megawatts. In addition, the temperature of the water in MIT's reactor core stays at 50 degrees Celsius, the equivalent of hot bath water, and is kept at atmospheric pressure. By comparison, a commercial power reactor usually has a core temperature of several hundred degrees Celsius, and the pressure usually exceeds 1000 pounds per square inch.

What this means, in effect, is that MIT's reactor doesn't work as hard as a large commercial reactor -- and the risk of failure, therefore, is substantially lowered. With lower temperatures and pressures, the chance of an event like a pipe rupture -- a big concern at power plants -- is seen as small.

"In a commercial plant, you're using highly enriched uranium, and you're talking about very intense pressures and temperatures to turn the turbines and produce electricity," says the NRC's Sheehan. "With a research reactor, you're using radioactivity at a much smaller level for experimental purposes."

Indeed, the kind of accidents that made Three Mile Island and Chernobyl infamous aren't likely to occur in Cambridge. TMI's accident was due largely to the errors of untrained staffers, who failed to respond properly when a valve became stuck and a reactor began losing coolant. Since the accident, training procedures have been overhauled. Chernobyl was an explosion, the impact of which was worsened because there was no containment facility surrounding the reactor, which allowed radiation to escape into the surrounding environment. US reactors, by comparison, are required to have containment facilities -- typically four-foot-thick, steel-reinforced walls.

This doesn't mean, of course, that any reactor, in Cambridge or anywhere else, is 100 percent safe. But MIT must submit its facility to frequent safety examinations. The NRC monitors the research reactor regularly; last inspected in 1997, it is due for another inspection by the end of this year.

MIT's reactor is also monitored by a gaggle of Cambridge officials, including representatives from the city's fire department, police department, and department of emergency management. In addition to checking the integrity of the reactor and the procedures for the receipt of nuclear fuel and the removal of waste, officials review the laboratory's inch-thick emergency plan. Members of the city's fire department receive specific training for the reactor site each year.

David O'Connor, Cambridge's emergency management director for the past 14 years, says that though he keeps a close watch on the MIT reactor, he doesn't consider it especially dangerous. Even the most severe accident or leak would be contained to the facility's parking lot, O'Connor says. "The risk of a tanker truck carrying hazardous materials like gas or chlorine having an accident is far, far greater."

A few years back -- after a news report about the threat of a terrorist attack on the reactor -- city officials examined the potential for a car bombing or other attack on the facility. But even that prospect doesn't get O'Connor too worried. "The structure itself is so substantial -- it looks like a big steel tank, but there's four feet of reinforced concrete," he says. "If someone tried to do bad things to the reactor from the outside, it is extremely unlikely that they could do damage to the reactor core."

Still, every threat must be taken seriously, O'Connor says. He recalls an episode several years ago, when a story began circulating around the city that "glowing green slime" was oozing out of the reactor. The story spread so far, he says, that both the NRC and the city investigated.

It wasn't true. "Strange rumor," O'Connor says.

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There's something very Cambridge about the MIT reactor debate. This is, after all, a city inextricably linked to higher education, but one that is not immune to town-versus-gown dustups. It's also a place with a long, fabled history of left-leaning political activism and insurgency. What could be more emblematic of this environment than a neighborhood controversy over a university nuclear reactor?

But to MIT, this isn't just an amusing backyard dispute. Indeed, there's a bit of grumbling at the school about the referendum, and especially about David Hoicka's campaign on its behalf, which officials say was riddled with factual inaccuracies and wild claims. There are plans at the school to upgrade the reactor from 5 to 10 megawatts, and it's uncertain whether the referendum debate will now affect that move.

Bernard, the lab director, says the voters should have taken more time to understand the reactor before they went to the ballot box. "There's an obligation, I feel, for the average citizen to at least keep up with something of what's going on in the scientific field," he says. "Because if they don't, they are incapable of judging what they really want."

But was MIT expecting too much by hoping residents would check out the reactor on their own? After all, the school could have mounted a counteroffensive to the ballot referendum; Sarah Gallop, the codirector of the school's office of government and community relations, says MIT was well aware of Hoicka's Move the Nuke campaign. Instead, she says, the school opted to wait for people to call with questions. The questions didn't come. "No one called," she recalls.

Gallop suspects that the referendum results notwithstanding, most Cambridge residents aren't upset about the MIT reactor. Since the ballot question passed, the school has received only three telephone calls about the reactor, she says -- and all three were from reporters.

But even if more people were calling, it's unlikely that MIT would be rushing to relocate its reactor. Gallop points out that despite the language of the referendum, the state legislature has no direct authority over the operations of nuclear facilities -- they remain under the purview of the NRC. And neither the NRC nor MIT is considering shutting or moving the reactor.

"The question passed, and MIT did not initiate an analysis to determine whether or not the reactor should be moved," says Gallop. "We have not done that, and we will not do that."

Still, the success of the referendum gives Hoicka's Move the Nuke campaign a certain stamp of legitimacy -- and confronts MIT with a potentially thorny neighborhood issue. From a public-relations standpoint, after all, it doesn't really matter whether every voter was well educated, or whether the referendum has actual teeth. What may matter more is that 5791 people think they made a statement about the reactor on November 3.

"The right for Cambridge residents to decide an important public-health issue should not be called into question, much less rejected, by MIT," says Eric Weltman, spokesman for the Toxics Action Center, a division of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MassPIRG).

But is the public really capable of judging the technical safety of a nuclear research reactor? MIT's facility, after all, has existed in Cambridge for more than 40 years without crisis. Is the school obligated to inform every resident that there's a reactor in town, or to hold an annual press conference to announce that it's still safe?

That's not really the question before Cambridge right now, though. The issue presented by Hoicka's referendum is whether a nuclear reactor should be situated in a busy residential and commercial area. It's true that the state doesn't have any direct authority over the MIT reactor, but if representative-elect Barrios (who is due to tour the facility on November 30) decides the matter is worth pursuing, it isn't going to go away.

In the meantime, MIT will be waiting. And so will its grassroots atomic adversary, David Hoicka.

"MIT is convinced that they can't do anything wrong, and that everyone should agree with them simply because they are MIT," Hoicka says. "That's not a healthy reality to live in."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.