WELCOME

Hello there! You can call me Hazard. I'm your average 21 year old emo attempting to become a nuclear physicist. I'm really into radioactivity/radiation, and this interest extends into nuclear reactors, isotope production, radiation detection, vintage radioactive collections, and suspicious vats of glowing green goo. I wanted to document my slow progress towards becoming a real life mad scientist, and I hope you enjoy the ride!

SPACES

This is my bedroom, where, because I am a genius, I keep much of my collection of radioactive fun! Luckily, the vast majority is uranium glass, which is what gives off that fantastic glow when hit with UV light despite its low activity levels.

This is the reactor I operate! It's a TRIGA Mark II, made with a fuel that allows for pulsing, or allowing the reactor to go supercritical with only prompt neutrons. The TRIGA is a research reactor so I can only hit a max power of about 250kW in steady state, but that's usually plenty for irradiation experiments.

BACKSTORY

I've always been pretty fascinated with "sciencey" stuff, but honestly was more of a humanities kid for most of school. My greatest joy in life was high school theater and I spent a good amount of time crying over base level math homework and hiding in the costume room. When I was 17 my dad (the real genius of the family) called me into his office to check out something using his homemade Geiger counter. He handed me an old antique vase we'd had forever, and when held close to the detector, you could hear a fast ticking noise. For some reason this completely and utterly exploded my brain and I immediately took to the internet and the library to learn about every single thing on radioactivity that I could. I cannot stress how suddenly I went completely off the rails. It became my personality within days.

This coincided with the time I needed to figure out what to do with my life, so without a second thought I decided to become a physics major so I could irradiate myself to my heart's content forever and ever. My first year was...difficult. I faced it online thanks to covid, and managed to completely flunk my first calculus class. I spent a good amount of time crying puddles onto my floor once I realized I was not actually a supergenius, but I still couldn't imagine doing anything but science now and thus forced myself to continue on.

Once I was actually able to get on campus, things started picking up. I managed to join a program to become an operator of the school reactor, got a job working at an industry company producing Ac-255, and a summer position at a national lab. I'm starting my Senior year of undergrad, and afterwards hope to join a PhD program in nuclear engineering! I'm incredibly excited to spend my time chasing this passion and interacting with others who share it:)