Last year, two students accomplished their goal of bringing nuclear learning to Redwood, when they started the Nuclear Club. The co-founders and presidents are sophomores Lillian Merrill and Rex Riedel. 

Nuclear Club experiments with radioactive isotopes, connects with professionals in their field, and tours California Nuclear Facilities. 

“I’ve had a fascination with nuclear science for a long time and I thought it’d be really great if I could find other people who were interested too,” Riedel said.  

The club recently brought in a robot dog from Gamma Reality Incorporated. Ryan Sunwong was one of the members who got to witness it.

“We brought in a robot dog with a new light detection and ranging sensor that can detect radiation and basically make a 3D map of any place and tell you where is the highest radiation,” Sunwong said. “We got to drive the robot around the school and we made a 3D map model of the school with radiation maps.”

Sophomore Alec Saldivar is another member who attended this after-school event. 

“They had three tablets, one for driving, and then two we used to see what it scanned, and that was really cool because you could see the whole school’s inner layer and where most of the radiation was at,” Saldivar said. 

Aside from out of school events, the club has weekly lunchtime meetings. At the meetings, Riedel occasionally has a topic to share, but often it is just a mellow place for the members to eat their lunch and converse. 

“Every once in a while I’ll bring in something that is cool that I wanna show off, last week I brought in some radioactive sources and some counter residue that I got my hands on, once I brought in a very large scintillator that I had. If there’s something that we wanna talk about that happened in nuclear, then we’ll talk about that, but mostly just people hanging out,” Riedel said. 

Riedel plans on continuing the club in his next two years at Redwood, and is working to have even more exciting events in the future for the club.

“We’re working on getting a tour of UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley is one of the top three schools in the country for nuclear engineering. So they have a huge nuclear department, and many elements were discovered there. We’re also hopefully working on visiting a Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, but that’s more of an orchestration,” Riedel said. 

Before starting Nuclear Club, Reidel had long been learning about nuclear. 

“I would go to antique fairs, I would collect radioactive sources, I toured a lot of facilities, nuclear power plants, stuff like that. I was in contact with the American Nuclear Society to start this whole program for multiple months before this club began. and I have quite a large collection of Geiger counters. I’m also a member of a research group at UC Berkeley,” Riedel said. 

Merrill had also been involved in nuclear learning before the club, and is the co-chair of the American Nuclear Society Accelerators Program. This is a student-led group that teaches students of nuclear science and technology. She is also involved in the Women In Nuclear GROW program, a nuclear mentoring initiative. 

Riedel encouraged anyone who has interest in nuclear-related activities to join.

“[If you] are interested in nuclear, if you want to learn more about nuclear and go and see these cool things that are happening in nuclear science, then you should join our club,” Riedel said. 

The club meets every Wednesday at lunch in room 225, and Riedel is contactable at [email protected] if you are interested in joining.