Education at the SLOWPOKE-2 Facility

The SLOWPOKE-2 Facility is intensely used to provide present and future officers of the Canadian Forces with experience with radioactive materials, radiation and many applications based on radioactivity such as non destructive testing.  A tour of the Facility is given each year to First Year Officer-Cadets, and they also have a short laboratory demonstration in which they are given the opportunity of observing a sample being irradiated and counted as a demonstration of the Neutron Activation Analysis technique.  Third and Fourth Year students participate in both neutron activation formal laboratory experiments and in a non-destructive technique through a laboratory experiment in neutron radiography using the neutron beam tube in the reactor pool.  Over the years, several projects based on the use of the SLOWPOKE-2 reactor have been offered to and carried out by Fourth Year Officer-Cadets as part of their CCE/F417 Chemical Engineering Design Project or SCE/F420 Senior Science Project courses.  A list of the projects that were completed appears below.

Graduate students have the option of taking a graduate course on radiation detection equipment (practical and theory) (Course CC515).  Another graduate course, CC507 Advanced Methods of Analysis, includes NAA in the topics covered by this course.  The Department offers degrees in nuclear science and nuclear engineering.  Lists of the thesis subjects and publications, made by the Nuclear Engineering Group, have also been included in this document.  Collaboration exist also between the SLOWPOKE-2 Facility at RMC and other teaching institutions such as Queen’s University and, more recently, University of Waterloo, University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Algonquin College, Pembroke Campus, which find it useful for their students to spend part of a day at the Facility to take advantage of its working reactor.

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