SUMMER 2022
SUMMER IS ONLY 93 DAYS LONG; MAKE THE MOST OF IT!
Staying cool on the hottest days!
Finally summer! Thank you so much for all the artwork submissions. It is clear that here in the Valley, we love to get outside, with skating, sliding and snow forts being the clear winners in winter activities. But now, after what felt like an endless spring, the sun is out, the water is warming and we can finally swap our skates for swim fins! Given that last year we featured a “cold” issue, to celebrate the coming summer, we thought we could turn up the heat a little and feature projects and activities from CRL which are focused on “hot” temperatures. Page 3 talks summer and sun safety with some interesting ways we keep our teammates cool on hot days; page 4 features a real-life dinosaur you may see while swimming, and page 9 has one of our coolest “hot” experiments, called a Cold Crucible. As always, we would love to hear from you, our readers, and we enjoy your artwork and puzzles. You can always send your questions or creative projects to communications@cnl.ca. Enjoy the issue and stay cool this summer! Philip Kompass, Editor communications@cnl.ca
At CNL, we have a lot of workers that do their jobs during very hot weather where the temperature outside or even inside some of our older buildings can be above 30 degrees Celsius. That's hot! Everyone has to be careful when working on hot days because the high temperatures and the sun’s UV rays could cause some health problems: •
•
•
•
You could become dehydrated where you don’t drink enough water because warm weather makes you sweat a lot and your body loses a lot of moisture. You could get heat stroke where your body temperature becomes very high when you’re in the heat for too long and you could become very sick. You might get a sunburn if your skin is exposed to the sun’s UV rays for too long, and your skin might become very red and may peel, which could be painful. Your eyes could be affected if they are exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays, which could result in eye problems in the future.
Summer Safety Tips! 1. Stay hydrated by drinking lots of cool liquids. 2. Limit time spent in the direct sun. 3. Take lots of breaks and rest in the shade. 4. Protect your skin with sunscreen. 6. Protect your eyes with sunglasses. 7. Always wear a hat when the sun is out.
2
Tools of the Trade: Summer Safety At CNL, we care about our workers. Their health and safety is very important. How do we protect our workers when they are working inside old buildings and outdoors during the hot summer months? In addition to the safety tips from the previous page, there are a few cool tools at our disposal. We give them lots of breaks and if they are outside, we even have air conditioned trailers that they can cool off in. If it is really hot, we have cooling vests and suits to wear underneath the Tyvek protective suits. Water in the suits is cooled by an ice pack and moves through small pipes inside the vest which keeps the workers cool. CNL also has strict times and time limits that workers work in hot conditions, and we look at the daily weather forecast and temperatures to create our schedules and set time limits.
But just how hot is too hot? Our bodies feel heat differently depending on lots of factors. To figure out how best to protect our staff on hot days, the Industrial Hygiene team at CRL conducts a "Wet Bulb Globe Test." This test takes into account the heat from the sun, evaporation, and the movement of air. Have a thermometer at home? Try this for yourself! You can see how your body will react to the humidity outside by covering a thermometer with a wet cloth. As water evaporates from the cloth, you will see that the thermometer cools down – just like how our bodies cool down with sweat. On less humid days, the water evaporates faster, helping keep you cool.
3
Creature Feature: Lake Sturgeon With the focus on heat in this issue, we thought it would be great to select a ‘creature feature’ that lives in the water. Meet one of Canada’s living dinosaurs – the Lake Sturgeon. If you spend time swimming, snorkelling or paddling near the beaches of the Ottawa River, you may have seen one of these amazing fish in real life. Though it may seem relatively common here in the Ottawa River, in many places in Canada its numbers are very reduced as a result of commercial fishing many decades ago, and habitat loss from the development of dams. The Lake Sturgeon is Canada’s largest freshwater fish. It is a very ancient species, and related to species dating back 200 million years! Its internal structure is cartilage (like a shark) and its skeleton is made out of external “scutes” which are large bony scales on the outside of its body. These scutes can help serve as protection for the fish like armor and make sturgeon distinct from other fish. It is dark to light brown or grey in colour on its back and sides with a lighter belly. It has four barbels or whiskers in front of its long, toothless mouth. Fast Facts: • Scientific name: Acipenser fulvescens • A Lake Sturgeon can live for more than 100 years, and grow to lengths of up to three metres! • Sturgeon were and still are an important fish to many indigenous peoples. These fish were used for food, the skin was used to make containers, the scutes were used to make tools and the tail bones were used to make arrowheads! • The Lake Sturgeon lives almost exclusively in freshwater lakes and rivers with soft bottoms of mud, sand or gravel. They are usually found at depths of five to 20 metres.
4
Cool Careers! Jae Young Lee Industrial Hygiene Technologist How would you describe your work? As an Industrial Hygiene Technologist, my job is to make sure that people are working in a healthy and safe environment, so that they don’t get sick or hurt at work. Workers may come across different types of hazards while on the job, such as very loud noises, chemicals, or air that is hard to breathe. I take samples, make calculations and do research on the risk. Then I am able work with the staff and find ways to help them to stay safe from those hazards. What is the most interesting or exciting part of your job? I like being able to work on lots of different projects. Each group does different work, so each team has new problems that I need to research and solve. When working on new projects, I get to use my skills and knowledge on many topics, which makes my job exciting. I also enjoy that I am always learning something new. My work in Industrial Hygiene is always changing as scientists do more research, and as we learn about new dangers that workers are facing -- I get to experience new things all the time! How did you become interested in Industrial Hygiene? While studying at university, I learned a lot about public health, especially Occupational and Environmental Health – which means studying how people can stay healthy at work, and how the environment around us can help or hurt our bodies. This was when I first found out about Industrial Hygiene. I also had a great opportunity to work with the Industrial Hygiene team at CNL while I was a university student, which I enjoyed very much. This helped me to decide that I wanted to become an Industrial Hygiene Technologist.
5
“Picture This” Challenge! For this issue's art challenge, we are asking you to draw us a picture of your favourite summer activity. When you are finished your artwork, send in a photo to communications@cnl.ca.
Word Search Puzzle | Discovery Education Puzzlemaker
4/22, 3:57 PM
Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists.
Word Search!
SUMMER
Are you able to unscramble these key words from this issue of Kids CONTACT?
heat, industrial, summer, sturgeon, water, cold, crucible, uranium, swimming, snorkel, beach beach
cold
crucible
6
Your AWESOME Artwork
Carson Mayumi
Meredith
Shanna
Willow
Dolly
Hide & Seek! Can you find all these items hidden in this issue of Kids CONTACT? Just write down what page you found them on in the small circle. Send in your entry, and you just might win a prize!
Jacob Charleigh
7
BUILDING A CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE: SMALL MODULAR REACTORS One very exciting project in Chalk River Laboratories’ future is the siting of a small modular reactor or SMR. SMRs are a new class of nuclear reactors – named for their much smaller size and a simpler design so that they can be produced in a factory and shipped to their destination. What’s more, SMRs will be made with improved safety features and can be used where traditional nuclear or other renewable sources of energy are not available, or to replace dieselfuelled generators in remote locations. Like current nuclear reactors, SMRs produce heat through a process called fission. This heat is then used to make steam that spins a turbine that creates electricity. SMRs produce high heat – some more than 600 degrees Celsius! One of their advantages is that they can be a source of heat for the buildings and homes near where they are located. A recent study showed that two SMRs could heat all the buildings and homes at Garrison Petawawa. With no need to rely on natural gas to produce their heat, Garrison Petawawa could reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent!
Another really cool (or, should we say hot?) thing about SMRs is that they can work alongside other energy systems. This means that the heat from an SMR can be paired with other technologies and produce such things as hydrogen for clean fuels and warm air for greenhouses in the winter. In the future, CNL plans to build a research facility – we call it CEDIR Park for Clean Energy, Demonstration, Innovation and Research Park – to explore all the possibilities.
8
Check out one of our ‘hottest’ facilities!
COLD CRUCIBLE INDUCTION FURNACE
Did you know that the nuclear industry is actually the safest energy industry? This is because we spend so much time studying and preparing for any possibility. In our Cold Crucible facility we do experiments to better understand exactly what goes on in the heart of a reactor, even if everything else goes wrong. During the extremely unlikely event of a severe accident, the uranium fuel, located within the core of a nuclear reactor, could overheat. The reactor could get so hot that some or all of the fuel and internal components would melt and form a liquid pool of molten “corium” in the bottom of the calandria vessel, the container which holds the reactor core. At roughly 2400°C this corium has a lot of energy and could damage parts of the reactor, even the calandria vessel itself. To investigate these types of accidents, we created the Cold Crucible Facility. In this facility, we use specialized equipment to both produce the corium and to contain it during the experiments. We use a 250 kW induction furnace (That’s enough power for 250 houses!) to heat two kilograms of material to the temperatures needed to simulate the conditions a reactor would see in a severe accident. But, corium is not always the same between different reactor designs, and to get accurate results, it is important that your corium is close to what would really occur within the reactor.
“Just like baking at home, you need to have all the ingredients at the right ratio, to be successful,” explains Blake Mitchell, Lab Supervisor. “We have different mixes of materials in our corium, including different reactor fuels and materials to match what would occur in a real reactor.” The team at CNL isn’t just looking at what happens to the reactor components, they are also looking closely at how the corium behaves. One big question we worked to answer was whether the corium would all blend together, or if the different molten materials would separate, like oil and water. The answer is important because it changes how we interpret the results of the tests. The information being gathered through these experiments helps to strengthen the computer modelling used in reactor safety, and ensures that the current and future reactor designs are prepared should this type of accident ever occur.
Shown here in Blake's hand is a ball of corium. Though molten during the testing, once it has cooled following the completion of an experiment, it looks and feels like a rock.
Why is something so hot, called a COLD crucible? In the cold crucible technique, while the bulk of the corium is heated by electrical induction, the outer layers are kept cool by a water jacket and remain solid. This means the corium forms its own container, cold on the outside and 2,400 degrees Celsius on the inside!
9
In “Under The Microscope” we’ll feature a sample image taken in our materials science laboratories, allowing you a close up view of the world we live in. In this case, we are featuring a closer look at a fresh green maple leaf.
ct #1 Fun Fa than 100 e re mor ple There a pecies of ma of s t n , e r ld or 10 diffe d the w anada: n u o r a trees ve to C leaf, re nati which a ck, silver, big , bla striped sugar, untain, anitoba. o m , d re and M s, vine, Dougla
N ICATIO AGNIF M X 0 2,00
AG 500 X M
N ICATIO AGNIF 100 X M
the ct #2 Fun Fa side of a leaf er r e low pp ll the u axis) and the hese a c s t is d ). T ra Botan face (o ce (or abaxis r u s l ia a adax ial surf the adaxis. e abax side th ictures show p
CNL Corporate Communications 286 Plant Road, Stn 700 A Chalk River ON, K0J 1J0 1-800-364-6989 communications@cnl.ca www.cnl.ca
TION NIFICA
Fun Fact #3 Many leaves ar e covered in small hair-like st ructures called trichomes. Thes e trichomes help the leaf ca tch water, and repel bugs and other bacteria.
If you have a question for one of our scientists, send it in by email to communications@cnl.ca. We'll get it in the next issue!
10
