In a small town in Eastern Ontario, deep in the Ottawa Valley, you can find the birthplace of Canada’s nuclear industry.
Chalk River Laboratories has been home to Canada’s first nuclear reactor, Nobel-award winning research, and game-changing discoveries in nuclear technology. And, for two weeks in July, 15 McMaster students went for the experiential learning experience of a lifetime.
Their trip was part of the fourth annual Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL)-McMaster Undergraduate Student Research Experience, run through CNL’s Academic Partnership Program. The science and engineering students from McMaster were selected from hundreds of applicants.
The four-month program starts with students working alongside faculty at McMaster, known as Canada’s nuclear university, before travelling north to spend two weeks working with scientists at CNL’s Chalk River Laboratories – Canada’s national nuclear laboratory.
Meaningful research
The students’ experience at CNL began at the Bertram Brockhouse building, which serves as the entry point for everyone who works at and visits CNL (named after the Nobel laureate and McMaster professor, who worked at the Chalk River laboratory NL from 1950-1962). From here, most visitors to CNL would be escorted around the campus, assigned to staff to monitor and prevent wandering. This is one of Canada’s most secure facilities, with stringent safeguards in place.
But the McMaster students receive a level of access rarely given to visitors, with permission to move independently around the campus and work in labs with their CNL supervisors.
On Day 1, when the supervisors and students met in person in Chalk River after weeks of corresponding virtually, it was hard to tell who was more excited. All parties were beaming as they found each other in an auditorium, and promptly departed together to check out the lab spaces where they’d be working for the next two weeks.
“This experience so far has been very surreal,” said Odessa Sloan, a third-year student in Chemical Biology, on Day 2. “This time last year, I was working as a camp counsellor.”
If not for the USRE, she’d most likely have been at camp again this summer. Instead, she’s looking at radiopharmaceuticals for targeted prostate cancer imaging and therapy.
Sloan is passionate about applying chemistry to meaningful, hands-on research, and the USRE offered the opportunity to learn more about radiochemistry and how it could integrate with organic chemistry to develop new therapeutic innovations.
“It’s super cool to be able to work with professionals in your field, people who are very knowledgeable. This is an experience that some people will never get,” Sloan said. “I’m trying to take in all the information and just really take advantage of this opportunity.”
Odessa Sloan in the lab with her CNL supervisor, Dr. Kevin Wyszatko, a radiopharmaceutical scientist.
Sloan’s project is one of several looking at radiopharmaceuticals. Other students’ projects are focused on TRISO particle fuel, neutron scattering, and recycling radioisotopes to reduce nuclear waste, to name a few.
Research in these areas could have applications across nuclear security and safeguards, forensics, environmental remediation, waste management, health care, and sustainable energy.
In addition to research, students also got a first-hand look at the nuclear facilities at CNL. That includes the historic National Research Experimental (NRX) and National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactors where Brockhouse completed his Nobel Prize-winning work.
It also includes Andew Erlandson’s lab, which has helped pioneer muon tomography – a technique that, among other things, has been used to reveal secret chambers in Egypt’s Great Pyramid.
Andrew Erlandson, Section Head/Applied Physicist.
They saw hot cells and fuel labs, inspection and monitoring technologies, corrosion loops and a hydrogen lab. They had lunch in the CNL cafeteria each day, sharing meals with leaders in the field while chatting about nuclear reactors.
They listened to expert presentations on nuclear engineering, high dose radiation, and the art of science communication. They toured the nearby nuclear heritage museum.
Throughout it all, they got to ask as many questions as they like – and they had many.
The McMaster students on a tour of the National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactor.
“This is more of the nuclear industry than I think any of us have ever been exposed to,” said Rhyana Martin, a fourth-year integrated science student. “Although Mac is very knowledgeable about it, probably more than other universities in Canada, here everything is nuclear. I think that’s the most exciting part – being around so many people that are so knowledgeable in the field and being able to take their knowledge and apply it to our own projects.”
Their time at Chalk River also gave them a taste of life in eastern Ontario. The CNL campus lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, surrounded by thousands of kilometers of boreal forest.
The McMaster students stayed in nearby Deep River, pop. 4,350. The small town is full of engineers and scientists who work at CNL. You’ll find roads named after famous physicists and nuclear pioneers: Rutherford Street, Newton Street, Farraday Street, Darwin Street.
The students – who have already had plenty of time to bond over the weeks working on their USRE projects at McMaster and the six-hour bus ride from Hamilton to Chalk River – got to know each other even better during this time. They shuttled to and from CNL together every day, and socialized together in the evenings.
A couple of them were in a motel room with an oven, so they organized a cheesecake and brie bake one night. On the weekend, they went to the beach, spending a hot day relaxing in the cool Ottawa River.
McMaster connections
The USRE program included a McMaster pairing this year: Student Logan McCready’s project was supervised by Georges Karagozian, a McMaster alumnus who works at CNL as a research and development scientist in inspection and monitoring technologies.
Karagozian finds it very rewarding to mentor early career engineers and share his work.
“This field is so niche, not many people know about it,” he said.
“Engineering physics, or electrical engineering students, might never consider a job in a field like this. Maybe they don’t even know it exists,” he said. “This is a great opportunity to show what possible paths they can take.”
McCready and Karagozian first met at the annual Nuclear Industry Night, organized by non-profit nuclear outreach organization NAYGN McMaster, last fall. Professor Mike Welland – who supervised Karagozian during his master’s degree – encouraged McCready to talk to him. They connected again when Karagozian returned for a guest lecture.
McCready at CNL.
Through the USRE, McCready’s spent his summer developing a machine learning model that can help analyze inspection data from steam generator tubes – an important safety component of nuclear reactors.
Steam generator tubes are small metal pipes inside a nuclear reactor’s steam generator. Thousands of tubes form a large bundle that acts as a vital heat exchanger and physical safety barrier between the radioactive primary coolant loop, and the non-radioactive secondary steam loop.
Karagozian and McCready test a steam generator tube.
During regular inspections, electromagnetic fields are used for non-destructive testing of the tubes – looking for corrosion, thinning, and cracks. A team of analysts evaluates the data on-site.
“It is tedious work. It is exhausting. There’s the mental pressure of it,” Karagozian said. “You have people in tight, possibly hot rooms.”
McCready’s project is trying to see if they can use an AI model to look at the data instead, to characterize types of flaws and predict the size of flaws from eddy current signals. It would take out the potential for human errors. “Trying to replace that with AI, it’ll be much faster, hopefully more accurate,” Karagozian said.
McCready’s work is fully computational, so there’s not much lab work involved. Instead, “we’re going to use the time here to conduct in-person meetings to get more input, and as much knowledge from other people,” Karagozian said.
Before arriving at Chalk River, McCready had been working with supervision from Welland at McMaster, and virtual meetings with Karagozian. “But here, he has the opportunity to meet other people in the branch, learn different things.”
Karagozian also tried to help McCready build industry connections. Opportunities to connect with industry experts abound here: People are extremely welcoming, always happy to help.
As student Andrea Srouji put it, “People here love students.”
Srouji, a third-year engineering physics student at McMaster, was at CNL separately from the USRE, for a co-op placement with Karagozian in the inspections and monitoring technologies branch.
Andrea Srouji, a third-year engineering physics student at McMaster, is completing a co-op placement at CNL.
At CNL, people are always “so willing to take you on a tour, always so willing to take time out of their day to bring you somewhere that you haven’t seen before, teach you something new,” she says.
Part of that, she thinks, is because the nuclear industry is facing a workforce gap with not enough trained professionals to meet the industry’s growing needs.
“People are putting a lot of effort in to pass their knowledge down,” she said. But that gap also creates a lot of opportunities – and a beautiful environment of learning – for students and recent grads interested in nuclear.
Making connections
The CNL – USRE program enables students to gain experience in the field and get exposed to different kinds of work. “It’s very valuable for students to get this experience and expose them to the industry and academia,” Karagozian said.
They also got to learn from each other: On their final night in Chalk River, the McMaster group and their supervisors gathered, and the students presented what they’ve been working on. They were a close-knit group by this point, having shared a nuclear learning experience that’s probably the most unique, and immersive, for Canadian undergraduates.
“The community that we formed as a cohort in this program has been really awesome,” McCready said. “At events at McMaster, learning about nuclear, through the whole summer – we’ve all got to know each other. We’ve really had the opportunity to develop a lot of relationships across faculties and with people that otherwise I might not have had the opportunity to meet.”
The fourth annual Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL)-McMaster Undergraduate Student Research Experience cohort.
The program has also provided real clarity for students on what a career in nuclear might look like.
“After second year, I didn’t really have a long-term plan or know what I wanted to do,” said Sloan. “Doing research this summer and getting a taste of nuclear and radiochemistry has inspired me. This is definitely a field that I’m more interested in, and I’m looking into careers that are in this field now.”
Lola Cejovic, a third-year chemical biology student, echoed that being at CNL has helped her to see possible careers to work towards. “It gives you a frame of mind of what’s out there…. you know, if I stay in the nuclear field, will I be in positions similar to the people that I’m working with?” Cejovic said. “That’s my biggest takeaway: maybe I could work here in the future.”