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Bruce Perens: The Day I Blundered Into the Nuclear Facility
Bruce Perens writes "I found myself alone in a room, in front of a deep square or rectangular pool of impressively clear, still water. There was a pile of material at the bottom of the pool, and a blue glow of Cherenkov radiation in the water around it. To this day, I can't explain how an unsupervised kid could ever have gotten in there."
Lots of universities had research reactors (a few still do). They had no more security than some bored grad students working in the outer lab. If it was an open house even they would have been too busy to look after every wandering kid.
When I was in high school we did a tour of university's research reactor, and like you said, the only people there were a few grad students and an operator (or maybe he was a professor?) - no armed guards, no fancy security systems, we just had to sign in with the student at the front desk. We weren't allowed in the room that had the reactor pool,but we could see it (and the blue Cherenkov Radiation glow) through a large thick glassed window. They said that the water was sufficient to contain the radiation but they didn't want many people in the reactor room since any contaminants in the water could become radioactive.
We were standing in the room that had the door to the reactor room, so I don't think it would have been hard for a kid to accidentally gain access to the reactor room if someone inadvertently left the door open or didn't pull it closed after they left the room.
But at the time, the coolest thing in the building was the remote manipulator arms they used for working with radioactive materials. After playing with those arms, I decided I was going to have a career in nuclear science. Though somehow I ended up in IT instead.
Back in 2006 I walked directly through Heathrow without ever being checked. Jetlagged all to hell I took a side door, dressed in a business suit and looking authoritative, zombied my way through a maze of corridors and past a desk of men staring intently at a monitor, before finding my way outside the airport.
On a subsequent trip, confused about the flight, I asked a man with a submachine gun the route to my gate, went there immediately, got there before the security team, and sat down watching every other passenger being frisked and scanned. The security guard was even there, someone pointed me out and obviously asked him a question, he shook his head no.
The more things change, eh?