Starting a nuclear reactor looks cooler than you think.

Yubileyny, 10,000 launch of the Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR) reactor in the laboratory of the US Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland base in New Mexico. C 1946 base is a key link in the Manhattan project . The reactor itself has been operating since 1979 and is mainly used for testing weapons in a nuclear explosion.

Curiously, this small 2MB test reactor at the time of the beam launch generates 35,000 megawatts of power for 7 milliseconds . This is three times more than the capacity of the largest US nuclear power plant in Phoenix. However, in the next building there is the SPUR - Sandria Pulse Reactor, from the start of which the blue rays in the eyes appear even if you just close your eyes while in the nearby parking lot:

If you are looking at your eyes, you can see it. Nice, eh? Anyway, SPUR uses 'weapons grade' material, thus the safeguards. I was there, by the way. ACRR, (Annular core research reactor), a 2MW toy reactor used for various tests. We used it to play with diffractive optics; fun project.

The “blue rays” themselves are charged particles moving with an excess of the phase velocity of light in a transparent medium called the Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation characteristic of all active reactors. In fact, in the video we see a chain reaction through the walls of the reactor.