May 2nd, 2025
Due to ongoing maintenance, we are not offering sign-ups for in-person tours at this time. We appreciate your patience as we continue working diligently to get tours going again!
Educators! Bring the MIT Reactor to your classroom by arranging a virtual tour, conducted during a video conference (e.g. Zoom, Google Meet). During our virtual tours, a member of our staff presents a video with footage of all the stops our in-person tours make. There’s no pre-recorded narration, meaning you’ll be directly interacting with us and able to ask questions as they come up. Virtual tours are about 30 to 45 minutes long depending on questions.
Enrich the experience for your students by adding a lecture to your virtual tour. Our lectures are about an hour long and cover topics such as nuclear fission, how reactors work, radiation safety, the design of the MITR, the experiments done at the NRL, and an overview of commercial power in the U.S. We can tailor the lecture to better suit the existing knowledge and learning objectives of your class.
Email nrl-outreach@mit.edu to request a virtual tour with at least a week of lead time. A form will be embedded here next week for submitting requests.
Here are two videos to introduce you to our facility. These videos are different than our virtual tour and can help tour participants become more engaged by introducing them to topics in advance to create a small amount of familiarity behind them, or suit as a substitute for visiting in-person. Educators are encouraged to contact us if they incorporate this into their cirriculums and would like to set up a complementary Zoom Q&A component!
Reactor Tour Video
Take a look inside MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Lab (K-12 audience):
5 Things You Wouldn’t Expect a Nuclear Reactor To Do
Some surprising ways you can utilize a nuclear reactor, specifically at MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Lab: