Last week I went to the "Keeping the Nuclear Option Open" (KNOO) annual meeting. I spent Thursday at Imperial College's Silwood Park campus at their CONSORT nuclear research reactor. CONSORT is the only civil research nuclear reactor in the UK (Mrs Thatcher got rid of the rest, apparently…)
The plan was for me (and the ~15 other students and postdocs present) to do some (well controlled) experiments with the reactor, but unfortunately some maintenance overran, meaning the reactor was shut down. Instead we did some small nuclear experiments which were still interesting.
As you can see from this Google Map, Silwood Park is somewhat more rural than the main Imperial campus. It is certainly set in beautiful surroundings, however I think it is firmly in the category of "nice place to visit but wouldn't want to live there". It is very isolated for a university campus - but then I suppose that's the idea when you have a nuclear reactor on site 
The following day, on the South Kensington campus in Central London, we had a day of talks from many people involved with the KNOO project across several disciplines. It was good to get the opportunity to talk to fellow researchers who are either interested in or directly connected to the nuclear industry. The whole point of the KNOO project is to bring together and train future nuclear engineers and scientists, as well as to showcase existing work in the field. I think the meeting was very useful in fulfilling those aims.
As an aside… for anyone who is an IChemE member and receives the tce magazine… the dodgy looking bunch on page 58 this month are my old team mates from my second stint working for BNFL NSTS, now Nexia Solutions.
As a second aside… I went to the Natural History Museum while I was down in London and was slightly surprised to be approached by a man in a tiger suit as I left the building. Apparently Shell are sponsoring an award of some description at the museum and some eco-warriors were protesting about it. Quite apart from the fact that they were clearly confusing Esso and Shell when it came to the tigery business, I wasn't entirely certain what they were actually protesting about. As an engineer (and indeed someone with half a brain) I was very tempted to stay and have an argument with him but I was past him before I knew it. Maybe next time…
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