On November 9, 2024, NSD hosted the 12th annual Nuclear Science Day for Scouts Event. One hundred and eighty scouts and fifty leaders attended this year’s event. Since the inception of this annual event in 2011, it has attracted over two thousand youths and five hundred scout leaders to Berkeley Lab. The primary goal of these events is to introduce nuclear science to middle- and high-school-aged students as a career option in their future.
The day began with a short lecture by NSD scientistHeather Crawford on the “ABC” ‒ representing alpha, beta, and gamma decay ‒ of nuclear science. Jacklyn Gates, the group leader of NSD’s Heavy Element program, then presented how to synthesize and identify Element-120 using a titanium-50 beam in an accelerator facility such as the 88-Inch Cyclotron.
After these two lectures, our guests performed hands-on activities at stations around the Berkeley Lab campus. These activities included the use of Geiger counters to survey everyday items (such as tableware) for radioactivity, the use of a portable cosmic-ray detector to “see” cosmic muons, the construction of a simple electroscope to get a deeper understanding of ionizing radiation, and assembly of different nuclei with marshmallows and chocolate. The groups also toured the beamlines of the Advanced Light Source, and had the opportunity to discuss career paths with scientists trained in nuclear science.
In addition to NSD, Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Office and the Advanced Light Source supported this year’s event. Forty-seven volunteers from NSD and across the Lab helped conduct activities at the event.
Staff in NSD also participate in other events to induce a sense of wonder in school-age kids and encourage them to pursue a STEM career. In December, Hannah Parrilla of the Applied Nuclear Physics program presented her research in a poster to students (in a style typical for school science fairs) at the Reverse Science Fair at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, an event coordinated by Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Office and Community Resources for Science in Berkeley. We will continue to engage these partners to promote nuclear science to the local community.
