Science in lux f Science in lux NASA’s Nuclear Program at Plum Brook Station 1955 – 2005 f by Mark D. Bowles The NASA History Series National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA History Division Office of External Relations Washington, DC June 2006 NASA SP-2006-4317 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowles, Mark D. Science in flux : NASA’s nuclear program at Plum Brook Station, 1955-2005 / by Mark D. Bowles. p. cm. -- (NASA SP-2006-4317) 1. NASA Glenn Research Center. Plum Brook Station--History. 2. Nuclear energy--Research--United States--History. 3. Nuclear rockets--Research--United States--History. 4. Nuclear reactors--Ohio--Sandusky--History. I. Title: NASA’s nuclear program at Plum Brook Station. II. Title. III. NASA SP-2006-4317. TK9230.B69 2006 621.48072’073--dc22 2006005497 Table of Contents Preface vii Introduction xv Chapter 1: Removing the Farmers 1 Chapter 2: Building for a Nuclear Airplane 35 Chapter 3: Going Critical with NERVA 79 Chapter 4: Experimenting with the Reactor 117 Chapter 5: Living with Radiation 167 Chapter 6: Halting Nuclear Momentum 215 Chapter 7: Restoring the Garden 245 Conclusion-- Disappearing in the Night 273 Appendices 281 A. A History of Atomic and Nuclear Experimentation B. The Fission Process and How a Test Reactor Works C. How a Test Reactor is Designed D. Other Research Facilities at Plum Brook E. Interviews Conducted for this Book About the Author 304 Index 305 NASA History Series 325 For Nancy and Isabelle Preface n June 2001 I was part of a group of historians and archivists visiting NASA’s idyllic-sounding Plum Brook Station, located in the rural countryside outside San- dusky,I Ohio. I had been to this place before when I was writing a book on the his- tory of the Centaur rocket and knew that the scientific community considered it one of the leading rocket-testing facilities in the world, where experiments on the Arianne rocket, Mars Pathfinder, and the International Space Station had been per- formed.1 But the reason for my visit that day was the two nuclear reactors housed at Plum Brook, the only such facilities NASA had ever built. I was going to write the history of these reactors and tell the story of why the government built them and was now in the process of tearing them down. Plum Brook is an intriguing place that inspires an air of mystery. In 2001 the facility played a role in Dan Brown’s best-selling thriller Deception Point, as a site for a scientific cover-up. His protagonist, Rachel Sexton, was an intelligence analyst who was “hardly able to believe she was going to talk about . a private test facility called Plum Brook Station.” 2 In this fictional world, the secrets of Plum Brook were not to be revealed to the public. But Brown’s story about the mysteries of the hidden region was familiar to local residents who told rumors about unexplained lights, weather- altering devices, secret research, and even stories about UFO sightings beyond the guarded fences.3 One Plum Brook director told a newspaper reporter in 1998 that many believed that the reason he would not let the public into Plum Brook was 1 Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, Taming Liquid Hydrogen (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2004-4230, 2004). John Mangels, “NASA Testing Facilities Count Rivals Among Customers,” Newhouse News Service (27 July 1999): 1. David Herman, “Following the Bouncing Ball on Mars,” Mechanical Engineering 118, 5 (May 1996): 106. James Ewinger, “NASA Glenn Powered Research into Solar Cells for Space Station,” The Plain Dealer(28 November 2000): 1B. 2 Dan Brown, Deception Point (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), pp. 371–373, 493. 3 One Plum Brook UFO sighting in 1967 was published in Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger, UFOs Are Here!: Unmasking the Greatest Conspiracy of Our Time (Citadel, 2001), p. 78. vii Science in lux . Preface f because NASA was doing “something secret” like “housing a flying saucer.”4 Radio- There were two reactors at Plum Brook, the main “test” reactor, and a smaller active research often spawns tales of fear and conspiracy among its neighbors. I was “research” reactor. Our plan was to actually go inside the main reactor and try to eager to explore beyond the Plum Brook fences and enter its dormant and nearly envision what it used to do when it housed a vibrant nuclear research program in deserted nuclear reactors that had sat unused for a quarter-century. the 1960s. Before we could enter, protocol dictated that we listen to a lecture given On the first day of research, once inside Plum Brook’s main gates, we drove in the trailers and read through a procedures manual about radiation safety. To down a narrow road through what scientists consider to be one of the best examples ensure that we understood what we were told, we had to take a multiple-choice test, of natural prairie and forest in the Midwest. Its other important natural feature is my first since my undergraduate days. After we passed the test, an engineer led us that it sits on the alluvial plain and has the lowest level of seismic activity in the into the reactor security building, where we affixed pen-shaped dosimeters to our entire United States—an important geological feature for nuclear research.5 There jacket pockets. These gauges could tell us if we were exposed to any unexpected were few people on site that day, and once we were away from the guardhouse and sources of radiation. With a final warning not to eat or drink anything in the reactor administration buildings, it was rare to see anyone else about. Plum Brook had once (eating a meal next to a nuclear reactor was the last thing on our minds), our guide employed nearly 700 people, but by the late 1990s there were only 12 civil servants led us inside. on site. When we finally emerged from the trees, we entered a grassy area to see the As we entered, the reactor we felt as if we had stepped back in time into the nuclear facility—once the second most powerful in the United States. 1960s. It was like a modern-day ruins, an eerie Pompeii-like place where the mate- Typically one thinks of the massive hourglass-shaped cooling towers that define rial culture of its final days lay untouched, with papers still on desks, equations power reactors. But nothing of the exterior of the Plum Brook reactor indicated on blackboards, and tools left on workbenches. All Plum Brook nuclear research what was inside. There was only a low, domed structure tucked into a 117-acre site had ended abruptly in 1973, when the government canceled the program without with a water tower, several adjoining office buildings, and temporary trailers hous- warning, forcing nearly 700 scientists and engineers to begin looking for new jobs. ing workers. As we parked the car in the gravel lot, we had to verify that this was A skeleton crew consisting of only a few individuals ensured that the closed reac- the right place. tor remained environmentally safe for the next several decades. The government I would later read accounts of others who had researched nuclear facilities and kept the reactor in this standby condition until 1998, when NASA finally allo- discovered that my first impression was not out of the ordinary. Hugh Gusterson, cated the funds and received the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) approval who wrote a study on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, experienced to decommission it. (The NRC’s Code of Regulations defines decommissioning as a similar initial reaction. He wrote, “When I first saw the laboratory, I was dis- the “safe removal of a facility from service and reduction of residual radioactivity appointed. Instead of the conspicuous high security, industrial landscaping, and to a level that permits termination of the NRC license.”)7 The decommissioning impressive modern architecture I had expected, I found a ragged, non-descript team established an interconnected series of trailers just outside the reactor, which sprawl of scrubland and trailers punctuated by the occasional modern concrete-and- served as the base for their efforts. They informally called this trailer region “Timmy dark-glass building.”6 The public perception of nuclear facilities and the true nature Town,” in reference to Tim Polich, the leader of the decommissioning team. He of life behind their fences are often at odds with each other. Plum Brook was much managed a group of experienced workers in the slow process of tearing down the like the place that Gusterson described. Trees dominated a landscape disturbed only reactors and transporting truckloads of contaminated waste to landfills in Utah and by sporadic, drab buildings, temporary worker trailers, and a domed building that South Carolina.8 hid inside its potential for unique scientific research. Tom Junod, a former “health physics” officer at the facility, told me that he 4 Robert Kozar, quoted in Ulysses Torassa, “10,9,8,7 . Little-Known Ohio NASA Facility Tests New Rockets, Jet Engines,” The Plain Dealer(19 April 1998): 1J. 5 Michael Mecham, “Big Room, Big Vacuum,” Aviation Week & Space Technology 159, 1 (7 July 7 John L. Minns and Michael T. Masnik, “Staff Responses to Frequently Asked Questions 2003): 46. Concerning Decommissioning of Nuclear Power Reactors,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission, June 2000, Box 8, Folder 6, Plum Brook Archives. 6 Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 25. 8 John C. Kuehner, “NASA Reactors Take Final Voyage,” The Plain Dealer(27 June 2002): B10.