Starting a nuclear reactor looks cooler than you think

Anniversary, 10,000 launch of the Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR) in the laboratory of the US Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland in New Mexico. Since 1946, the base is a key link in the Manhattan project . The reactor itself has been operating since 1979 and is used mainly for testing weapons in a nuclear explosion.

Curiously, this small 2MV test reactor generates 35,000 megawatts of power for 7 milliseconds at the time the beam is launched . This is three times more than the capacity of the largest US nuclear power plant in Phoenix. However, in the next building is SPUR - Sandria Pulse Reactor, from the launches of which the blue rays in the eyes appear even if you just close your eyes while in a nearby parking lot:

According to the people who had been there a while , when SPUR fired you could be in the parking lot on the left with your eyes closed, and the blue flashes you'd see were fast neutrons zipping through your eyeballs. Nice eh? Anyway, SPUR uses 'weapons grade' material, thus the safeguards. None of this was classified when I was there, by the way. The other area inside the main fence is ACRR, (Annular core research reactor), a 2MW toy reactor used for various tests. We used it to play with diffractive optics; fun project.

The “blue rays" themselves are charged particles moving with an excess of the phase velocity of light in a transparent medium called the Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation inherent in all active reactors. In fact, in the video we see a chain reaction through the walls of the reactor.