- Hi, I'm Dr. Nehemiah Mabry, engineer, educator and entrepreneur, also a very proud graduate of North Carolina State University.

Right now, I'm on campus right outside of Burlington Nuclear Laboratories, home of the Nuclear Engineering Department, also home to the very first civilian nuclear reactor.

Now, before you start thinking about all the things that could go wrong with nuclear energy, I wanna tell you about some things that could go right.

Right through these doors.

Come on, let's take a look.

[bright music] - We are the first nuclear civilian reactor in the world.

In 1949, some of the visionaries of this campus decided that they wanna build a nuclear reactor.

And at that time, all the nuclear reactors in the world were behind secret fences.

- [Dr. Mabry] Clifford Beck, a native of Salisbury North Carolina, was a renowned physicist who had worked on nuclear research during World War II.

Dr. Beck came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to work on the first nuclear reactor at NC State.

There were no textbooks and the first students were Air Force officers.

They associated themselves with a program launched by President Dwight Eisenhower called Atoms For Peace.

- And they wanted to show the world that nuclear is useful, nuclear is safe, and that we can actually take it to the level of serving the progress needs of society.

- [Dr. Mabry] There are currently 244 students, that's undergraduate and graduate students, in the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

- This is the control room of the PULSTAR Reactor at NC State.

From this area, we can operate and control the reactor.

And if you look down, this is the nuclear reactor itself.

This is an open pool of water, and at the bottom of it, there is a blue glow region.

That blue glow region is the core of the nuclear reactor and that's where we have the nuclear fuel.

The nuclear fuel is basically uranium and it's a special form of uranium.

It's uranium dioxide.

The blue glow itself is a product of the interaction of the radiation that is emitted in the core itself and actually moving through the water at very high speeds approaching and exceeding the speed of light of some of these particles in water.

The nuclear reaction, when it takes place, it generates two products.

It generates energy and it generates radiation, and we can use both of them.

We can also use the radiation that it generates for other purposes; for example, medical purposes.

So every hospital you go into, there is a nuclear medicine department that helps with the diagnostics of patients, and there is also radiation therapy departments that could be used for the treatment of cancers and other illnesses possibly.

- Unfortunately, the legacy of nuclear engineering and science is connected with the military applications, but this is because it's really tremendous power source.

It's much more powerful than the conventional sources, but this can be used for good.

And currently, most of the issues of nuclear power have been addressed, like safety, like waste.

- The water itself is about 20 feet above the core of the reactor.

This is normal water, just like the water we drink, but this water does three things.

It cools the reactor.

It also is a radiation shield.

It protects us while we are standing here, so no radiation really hurts us.

And also, it's the catalyst for the nuclear reaction that's taking place.

Without water, we would not have this nuclear reaction.

We have special filtration that takes place and also we deionize it, so this type of water is more clean than the water you actually drink at home.

But we don't drink it.

- We had the first reactor here at NC State at a university in this country in 1953.

We had the first PhD graduate in nuclear engineering in this country in 1955.

We had the first woman graduate in PhD in nuclear engineering in 1970.

Number of firsts, very well-known.

- For 70 years, the operations of the nuclear facilities, and the nuclear reactor in particular on this campus, have been done with the utmost of safety.

We are a federally regulated facility.

- Our department at North Carolina State University is the only nuclear engineering department in the state and offers a lot of opportunity and combines advancing engineering with nuclear power.

This is the future, and this is very attractive to young generation.

- Students in particular, the new generation, are very passionate about their work.

They want to save the world, wanna leave it a bit better than how they found it.

So they're coming in understanding that we need to do things differently around climate and they've chosen nuclear to make that impact.

And then, there's another set of students that are looking to work in the medical field.

And then, there are other students that just come in, they say, "This technology is cool, I wanna learn it," and are trying to find their place.

- If you don't wake up most mornings wondering, "What am I doing here," or, "Am I in over my head," then you're probably not doing your job right.

- [Dr. Mabry] In addition to the nuclear reactor itself, a wide array of research is being conducted in Burlington Lab.

- Basically a diamond and crusted saw blade and I'm able to make these little wafers.

So I cut the core into these tiny little discs.

It is smaller than a dime.

- [Dr. Mabry] Some of it relates to plasma systems for industrial applications.

Other research is dedicated to next generation plasma devices for new health applications.

- So in this lab, I'm doing multiple things.

I'm supporting our new graduate certificate in health physics and our undergraduate minor in health physics, but it also helps support the research thrust in nuclear forensics and nuclear nonproliferation.

Yeah, it's really cool.