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More than 100 high school students joined a trip last weekend to the Da Lat Nuclear Research Institute, located in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, to get hands-on experience as nuclear engineers.

They were participating in a program titled “A Day as Nuclear Engineers” run by Da Lat University in collaboration with the institute to provide local students with a better knowledge of nuclear power and radiation.

During the trip, the participants, who were all wearing protective clothing, were given modern radiation detectors and instructed to conduct experiments with radioactive sources.

The students were also guided on how to protect themselves from radiation.

They expressed their surprise and fear after seeing a detector reporting radiation whenever they tested it with the tool.

“We are living in a radioactive environment, everything is a radioactive source. What matters is which level of radiation is safe,” Nguyen Xuan Hai, director of the institute’s training center explained. “We can work with radiation our entire life if we know about its safety limitation.”

“We are living healthily even though we have been affected by radiation since before we were even born,” Trinh Thi Tu Anh, an instructor at Da Lat University’s nuclear technology department added after showing a table featuring a comparison of radiation levels in different places.

According to the table, the radiation level around nuclear power plants is much lower than that of the level around a person after a flight from Vietnam to Europe.

It just measures one-sixth of the radiation level of a patient after taking an X-ray at a hospital, and almost double the level from cosmic rays absorbed by a person in one year.

While taking the students around the institute, the head Nguyen Nhi Dien told them about the world’s serious nuclear accidents, namely the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine in 1986 and the Fukushima double disaster in Japan in 2011, as well as their long-time effects on human beings and the environment.

“I didn’t tell the stories to intimidate you and make you give up on your dream. I talk about the accidents to remind ourselves to never underestimate radiation risks,” he said.