A year in Station Physics
This was, without question, my favourite job. Not because of the title. Not because of the career trajectory. But because of where it was.
I spent a year working in the Station Physics department at a nuclear power station. By the time I arrived, it was already decades old. It felt less like a workplace and more like a museum that just happened to still be running. Every day felt slightly unreal but in a nerdy-cool way.
I’d come out of university expecting something a bit different. What I got instead was a role focused on statistical analysis.
- Looking at operational data.
- Trying to understand what it was telling us.
- And occasionally, trying to explain things no one fully understood.
One of the first pieces of work I was involved in was reviewing fuel handling issues. When fuel elements were loaded or withdrawn from the reactor, things didn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes elements would:
- stick
- require excess force
- fail to be picked up cleanly
Each of these incidents was recorded. My job was to make sense of them. The data came in through forms. That data ended up in spreadsheets. From there, it became patterns. Most issues weren’t surprising. Older fuel, particularly in outer regions of the reactor, had a tendency to deform over time. That led to predictable problems. The interesting part was identifying what wasn’t expected.
- Incidents in areas where fuel shouldn’t have degraded.
- Repeated issues in specific channels.
That’s where the analysis mattered. The outcome wasn’t a fix. It was a recommendation.
These channels should be inspected at the next outage.
That was enough.
Another piece of work was more interesting.
A change had been introduced to improve reactor performance. Absorber elements were installed in certain channels to reduce edge temperatures. It worked.
- Temperatures dropped.
- Reactor output improved.
And then something unexpected happened. Radiation counts — BCD counts — increased. Not a small increase. A noticeable, consistent signal that didn’t match expectations.
So we started investigating.
The first assumption was contamination.
- Thorium.
- Uranium.
Reasonable theories. We tested them.
- On-site analysis.
- External labs.
- University involvement.
No evidence to support either theory. So we looked at the behaviour instead.
- The decay curve.
- The half-life.
The numbers suggested something closer to fission products. Not contamination. Not a fault. Just something we hadn’t fully anticipated.
At that point, the goal shifted.
Not “solve the mystery”. But:
- understand the behaviour
- confirm it wasn’t dangerous
- monitor it over time
The conclusion wasn’t clean.
We don’t fully know the cause.
But we knew enough and sometimes, that’s the job.
Looking back, I didn’t fully appreciate what I was doing at the time. It just felt like working through spreadsheets and writing reports. Now it’s clearer. This was my first real exposure to:
- complex systems
- imperfect data
- unknown outcomes
And the idea that:
you don’t always get to the answer — but you still have to make a decision
I’ve done more “advanced” things since. More modern tools. Bigger systems. But I’m not sure anything has felt quite like this. A quiet office in a very old power station. Trying to understand something that didn’t quite make sense and being trusted to get close enough.