An abandoned nuclear power plant. The laboratory was built upon the vestiges of a huge project—the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant in Elma, Washington—that never saw the light of the day. In the end, reactors 3 and 5, which were part of what aspired to be the biggest nuclear energy facility in the U.S., were abandoned in the ‘80s without ever splitting a single atom.
Designed to resist all types of impacts and earthquakes, the facility’s structures would have been extremely expensive to demolish, so NWAA Labs adapted itself to them. The reactor serves as the reverberation chamber, the turbine room is the anechoic chamber, and the plant’s old control center now serves as the lab’s control center. Nonetheless, the facility, which still bears the signage related to its former life, continues to be a “uneasy” maze.
The ideal facility. NWAA Labs is a project created by Ron Sauro, a Stanford-educated electrical and mechanical engineer. Unexpectedly, Sauro managed to combine working at NASA with performing as the Vox organist of The Rivieras, which had an album go gold in 1963. After spending a lifetime designing sound systems, Sauro believed that the abandoned, bombproof nuclear power plant had unique potential.
The external structure, with its nearly five-foot-thick walls reinforced by steel, is designed to support a magnitude 10 earthquake and a direct impact of a 10-megaton explosion on its roof. The internal structure, meanwhile, is isolated from the surrounding terrain by a trench that minimizes the transmission of vibration and sound.
Furthermore, there’s another trench inside the internal structure made of concrete and steel, which was originally designed for the nuclear reactor. The entire facility is built on a layer of sandstone roughly 10,000 feet thick.
Near-total silence. These structures have allowed NWAA Labs to create the two largest reverberation chambers in the world. These are rooms where sound can bounce for up to 28 seconds without absorbing material, which allows experts to measure the sound power of specific sources and the absorption capacity of certain materials.
Besides the reverberation chambers, the laboratory has anechoic chambers designed to absorb sound and simulate a space free of reflections. In these chambers, there is almost absolute silence. The background noise is -42 db, which is too low for the human ear to detect. In the old turbine room, a nearly 650-foot-long and 350-foot-wide cavern with a height of roughly 80 feet, reflections take so long to arrive (more than 160 milliseconds) that there’s no need to take additional precautions when carrying out measurements.
Who uses this laboratory? NWAA Labs carries out tests for the audio industry. Speakers represent 20% of its business. In fact, more than 3,000 speakers from about 300 high fidelity professional brands have passed through its doors.
Nonetheless, NWAA doesn’t limit its services to the audio industry. Other companies use the facility to test out everything from construction materials and sound insulation to noisy washing machines or airplane cabins. The laboratory also brings in musicians, video game designers, and cinematographers, all of whom are fascinated by its acoustics and its post-apocalyptic scenery.
Images | Greg Dunlap (Wikimedia Commons) | Walter Siegmund (Wikimedia Commons)
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