Visiting restricted areas of a nuclear facility via a virtual reality simulator

The Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear (IEN) is a nuclear research facility whose main research lines comprehend non-destructive essays with thermal neutrons in biology, industry, environment and national public security. IEN is a restricted areas access composed by several laboratories, a particle accelerator and a nuclear research reactor known as the Argonauta. Viewing the accident in Fukushima has contributed to the reinforcement of the concern related to the nuclear applications, thus highlighting its negative aspects, it is important to provide information about what are the real purposes of a nuclear facility to avoiding misunderstandings created by sensational headlines. On the other hand, several researchers have proposed applications using virtual reality techniques to solve nuclear engineering related issues in recent years. Additionally, technical literature records a large number of uses of virtual reality concepts to develop simulated environments with a high degree of fidelity to their real counterparts. Therefore, this survey proposes a virtual environment that is able to simulate the visit procedure in a nuclear facility to provide information about the nature and purposes of the procedures, products and services developed in such technological centers without the access constraints found there. To do so, we used the Argonauta as case study. A group of 56 interviewees evaluated the proposed environment by means of a questionnaire composed by Likert-scale questions. Their feedback has shown that the proposed method can give a more reliable glance about the benefits of the nuclear energy thus contributing to avoid that only its negative aspects are known.