Read College is a quintessential liberal arts school in the Northwest.

It's got small classrooms, hands-on learning, just about 1,400 students, and it's all on

a beautiful campus in Portland, Oregon.

As you might expect at a liberal arts school, popular majors at Read are things like psychology,

political science, history.

But for the past 50 years, Read students have had access to a scientific instrument

that many people have never even seen before.

It looks a little bit like a giant swimming pool.

It glows, it's really beautiful, color blue.

You'll be able to find pictures of it online.

Pictures don't do it justice, the blue glow just looks so amazing in person, and it doesn't

look like anything else on Earth.

That blue color is something called shrink-off radiation, which is effectively like the

sonic boom when something breaks the sound barrier, except for it's with light.

And the blue glow are all of those light booms that are being emitted by those electrons.

So it looks really amazing.

And why is there a glowing blue pool of irradiated water at Read?

Because there's a nuclear reactor sitting at the bottom of that pool.

I'm Dylan Thoris, and this is Atlas Obscura, celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to the world's only nuclear reactor operated by liberal arts undergraduates.

And we're going to find out what happens when you go on the team.

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