bIoMEdICAL RESEARCH - North Carolina A&T State University

Dr. Abdellah Ahmidouch is a nuclear physicist and chair of the
Department of Physics at NC A&t. he received his Ph.D. from
the University of Geneva, where he worked on an experiment
at CerN, the european organization for Nuclear research,
which is home of the Large hadron Collider, the world’s largest
particle accelerator.
his immediate response to the fukushima Daiichi disaster is
one of mild disbelief at the suspension of basic common sense:
“Isn’t it strange that they built six nuclear reactors on the ocean
front of a country that has an established history of seismic
and tsunami activity?” But, despite the severity of the event, he
remains optimistic about the continued use of nuclear energy.
“I don’t think the accident in Japan will stop the current
movement toward additional nuclear power,” he said from the
nuclear physics lab in marteena hall, “but it will make people
Ahmidouch in his laboratory surrounded
by equipment that he and his students
used in their experiments of cosmic
partial detection.
more careful. those reactors had three layers of safety, and
they all failed.”
the first line of defense was to insert the control rods, which
shuts down the reactors. “But even with the control rods in,”
Ahmidouch says, “there is still some radiation in the reactor and
the water cooling system is necessary. the same applies to the
storage area where the spent fuel rods are kept. Just because
the reactor is shut down doesn’t mean this is a safe environment.
Cooling water needs to be pumped continuously.”
the second line of defense is the backup diesel generators,
which kick in when the primary source of electrical power is
lost, reestablishing the ability to pump cooling water into the
reactor cores and waste storage areas.
“this also happened,” Ahmidouch explains. “however, 20
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