After waking up at 4 in the morning and taking the hour and a half drive down from Madison to Rockford, we drove up to the two cooling towers of the Byron Clean Energy Center (its official name, and Constellation doesn't like calling their plants nuclear). Basked in beautiful golden sunrise light, I was so hyped as this was the first time I had seen cooling towers - all the nuclear power plants in Minnesota use the Mississippi for cooling.

The reason only one of the cooling towers has vapor coming out is because one of the reactors was in an outage - they turned it off to both reload the fuel, as well as preform maintenance on both the reactor as well as the generator.

We started out in the training center, getting a rundown of what we would be seeing and doing. They took us to learn how to put on the anti-contamination suits (and more importantly, how to take them off without getting possible contamination on yourself). After this, we split into groups with guides that would both act as our tour guides, as well as our security supervisors.

I don't want to say to much about the security process, other than it was pretty much what you would expect. Guards with automatic rifles and cool tattoos checked our IDs and had us use interesting fingerprinting? devices, we passed through many layers of barbed wire fences, and if you looked around long enough you could find the lookout nests where more armed guards were watching you. It was sick.

What I noticed was once we were inside, it felt like any other office, with cubicles and safety awards on the walls. Lots of Chicago Bears merch. But once we were given our dosimeters, passed through some fire doors and into the generator building, it was a whole different environment. Because reactor 1 was in an outage, the entire generator - which was huge by the way, easily large enough for a person to stand in - was dismantled, with outage workers hard at work providing whatever maintenance was needed. It was a lot louder than I expected, the hum of the one generator that was running was easily enough to cause hearing damage if not for the earplug we had in. This loudness would continue as we got closer to the reactor, put on our contomination suits, and entered the spent fuel storage area. This was the large pool of water people often fantasize about swimming in, with a large grid of spent fuel at the bottom and an awesome glow. The refraction of the water made the bottom look much closer than it really was. After checking this out, we got to enter the reactor containment. As we walked in (through an interesting little tunnel thing) you had to push against a high wind I assume was to prevent much contamination getting through, but also had the nice side effect of cooling us of a little as we were baking in those not so breathable contamination suits. Inside was amazing - we were walked around and shown all the safety features of the PWR, a worker stuck a radiation detector right up to the exposed reactor to show just how much a couple of feet can affect radiation levels.

After the containment tour, they took us to see the training room - a replica of the control room. Here we got to see what each of the panels did, how the reactor operators controlled the reactor, and we even got to do a mock startup (so COOL!).

This was one of the coolest experiences in my life, and I am so glad I got to do it. Thank you to everyone who made it happen, all the workers at Byron and Constellation, as well as all those in UW ANS that helped organize it.