How an unused nuclear power plant became home to a world-class acoustics lab
I visited Satsop on a drizzly day in March to meet Ron Sauro, owner and operator of NWAA Labs. Sound-dampening construction materials, noisy washing machines, even the crew cabin of an airplane — these are all things that have passed through the doors of his lab. When companies need to verify how much sound their products make — or how well they dampen sound — they call Ron. I meet him in the parking lot just outside his office and follow him past a sign that states, in no uncertain terms, that I’m entering the premises at my own risk. I make my way into the finished but never-used auxiliary building that would have housed WNP-3’s nuclear reactor.
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He and his wife Bonnie opened NWAA Labs in 2010 after convincing the building’s ownership that they could build an acoustics lab in the facility in five months as a proof of concept. Fifteen years later, they’re still operating it out of Satsop, and as far as acoustic lab spaces go, it’s safe to say this one is one of a kind.
To measure how much sound something makes, or how much sound it absorbs, you need a controlled space. Standards organizations… offer strict guidelines for different kinds of acoustical tests. They include specifications… The job of an acoustics lab is to follow those specifications to guarantee a level of consistency…. Clients use that information to help inform their designs or ensure that their products conform to standards for noise emissions.
Stepping through the threshold of the auxiliary reactor building, Sauro points out the exterior walls: five feet thick, made of solid concrete and sturdy rebar. I follow him on a curved path marked with yellow lines around the structure that would have housed the reactor; its round cave-like opening is dark and covered by a padlocked fence. …
Sauro … A former NASA scientist, he was looking for a new home for his acoustics lab … The couple was considering building a facility into a quarry’s hillside, but when they got word that the former nuclear plant was starting a new life as a business park, they looked at the reactor building. “If you can’t find a mountain, you make a mountain,” he says. He made that mountain inside of WNP-3.
Acoustics testing,…means creating a controlled space to measure sound, without interference from background noise. Satsop’s remote location means there’s not much in the way of outside noise to deal with; the thick concrete walls take care of the rest.
The insulation provides another benefit: stable temperature and humidity, which are important when you’re studying how sound moves. No matter what temperature it is outside, it’s somewhere around 54 degrees inside of the reactor building. Sauro says that building a place with the kind of temperature control required to run his lab would have cost millions; in the reactor building, temperature control is a permanent feature.
Sauro takes me to the second floor, where the control room was once located. The couple converted two neighboring rooms into reverberation chambers with a 12-by-10-ft opening between them. This allows them to test materials for soundproofing and transmission loss…. The receive room… ceiling is suspended by springs, and the floor and walls are all separated from the rest of the building. Sauro says it’s the quietest non-anechoic room in the world, and just breathing raises the sound level by a thousand times.
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Next door in the turbine building, Sauro has a free field speaker testing rig set up. The turbine building is more than 600 feet long, with two 250-ton bridge cranes spanning the width overhead. Steam generated by the reactor would have been piped over to this building, turning the turbine which was connected to a generator. Sauro’s testing rig is set up on the turbine deck…
The free field rig is a little Lovecraftian. It’s a tall structure with an arm that curves forward over a pedestal. The arm is covered in a kind of white insulation, and it’s punctuated with 19 microphones pointing inward that look like teeth, or maybe daggers. When it’s rigged up for testing, Sauro will put a speaker on the pedestal and play sound from it while it rotates. The resulting data gives a three-dimensional picture of the speaker’s performance.
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That’s the thing about a mountain. As Sauro puts it, “You work around it. It doesn’t work around you.” That’s just the nature of a structure made to contain a nuclear reactor. “You can’t modify it. It costs too much money and it’s almost impossible physically to do.” Tearing down a building meant to withstand a magnitude 10 earthquake isn’t a viable option, either. “This building is gonna be around 1,000 years from now,” Sauro says of the reactor housing.
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… Sauro says that people often expect him to wear a white lab coat. “Real scientists dress like I do,” he says, gesturing at his T-shirt and zip-up sweatshirt. “We work our butts off, and we do a lot of physical labor, a lot of construction.” From his years at NASA to WNP-3, he has had to assume a lot of different hats just to figure out the next step in whatever he was building or testing. “I’m a carpenter, a plumber, a welder, I can fix a car,” he says. “Anything that needs to be done, I can do. Because I have to.”
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