This book traces the history of one of the most powerful nuclear test reactors in the US and th only nuclear facility ever built by NASA. The history of Plum Brook reveals the perils and potentials of that nuclear technology. (Amazon.com)

Introduction:

In 1970 Robert Earle wrote a science fiction novel called Hot Lab, the plot of which centered on the use of  adioactivity as a scientific research tool. It took place at the fictitious Pine Valley Laboratories, a remote rural facility, where engineer Richard Rendfel, the book’s protagonist, moved with his young family to work.

This was a reactor that produced streams of neutrons for experimentation, not power for energy consumption. These “neutron fluxes” were very intense beams of radiation that experimenters directed at various materials in the hopes of learning new secrets about their atomic makeup. Researchers exposed the objects to the radiation near the reactor core for a specified length of time and then moved them via underwater canals to the “hot laboratories” for investigation. These were shielded cells aligned in a row where the engineering operators stood side by side, peering into them through thick plate-glass, oil-filled windows.

They interacted with the materials through the deft use of robotic manipulator arms, which were huge claw-like devices that enabled the engineers to perform experiments on the materials without exposing themselves to high levels of radiation. After Rendfel’s first day on the job, his supervisor told him: “We get nearly everything you can imagine—bottles of irradiated calf ’s liver, elastomers, transistors, timing devices, sledge hammer handles, and static eliminators for tape recorders. It seems that everybody wants to irradiate everything they can lay their hands on in hopes of a scientific or commercial breakthrough.” The term “irradiation” refers to the placement of materials near a radioactive source such as a nuclear reactor.

After World War II, irradiation studies became a new and exciting field of science. The narrative in Hot Lab reflected this importance, and Rendfel’s fictional experiences were typical of those who worked inside and lived on the outskirts of a test reactor devoted to irradiation experiments. Rendfel participated in the scientific research and devised ways to maintain and repair various aspects of the facility. He learned about the history of the laboratory, which was as an old munitions factory, and worked daily in its “dreary glamor.” He helped gauge the power of the reactor by measuring its neutron flux. He studied problems of corrosive fuel and the concerns about radiation damage to the reactor itself. He witnessed the protests by antinuclear activists and speculated that the nuclear industry had brought some of the attacks upon itself by its own self-criticism. In awe he watched the proficiency of hot laboratory engineers who used their master-slave, robotic claw arms to manipulate the irradiated materials removed from the reactor core.

During quiet moments he saw them practice their craft by attempting incredibly meticulous tasks like threading a string through the eye of a needle in their radioactive cells. The engineers performed this demonstration of their skills for the frequent visitors to the laboratory, and especially for the “red carpet” tours by astronauts.

Rendfel also attended the numerous laboratory parties and quickly felt the tight collegial bonds between the engineers and technicians.

With safety an ever-present concern, Rendfel frequently interacted with “health physicists” whose job was to take air samples and monitor the amount of radiation each employee received. Since many people speculated that radiation effects accumulated slowly over time in people, he helped enlist volunteers to work in highradiation areas for short periods of time to perform critical tasks. Rendfel always carried a dosimeter with him to register the radiation that his own body received, and when he was exposed to too much, health physicists sent him to the Radiation Control and Treatment Laboratory for immersion in the whole-body radiation counter. Safety was on the minds not just of employees at the reactor but also of the country itself, because the United States was locked in an “atomic stalemate” with its rival superpower. The nuclear standoff between the nations created a “world based on fear.”

For the employees at the fictitious Pine Valley there was a more immediate concern. There were rumors that the government was about to cancel all work on nuclear-powered aircraft and rockets. If this were to happen, the entire Pine Valley Laboratories would be vulnerable, because this was one of their primary areas of research. Rendfel realized, “The place could be shut down.” Despite the importance of Pine Valley’s research for the nuclear aircraft and rocket program, Rendfel knew that his job was in constant jeopardy. He said, “The final irony . . . is that . . . the entire Pine Valley Plant could be completely closed down without anyone being the wiser—or really caring if it never reopened.”

Robert Earle, the author of Hot Lab, was not a professional writer, nor did he even exist. The name was a pseudonym chosen by Robert Oldrieve, an engineer who wrote the book while he was the hot laboratory supervisor at NASA’s Plum Brook nuclear test reactor in Sandusky, Ohio, from 1959 to 1965. Though the plot of his science fiction story was a fabrication, he based all of the surrounding elements on fact. After World War II, the government, universities, and private industry built numerous nuclear research facilities to study the effects of radiation.

The experiments included irradiating materials used to construct future power reactors, develop nuclear weapons, and study radioisotopes in medicine. Research reactors also played pivotal roles in developing future propulsion systems for nuclear submarines, airplanes, and rockets. Other elements of Oldrieve’s story were also true. The munitions factory, radiation damage, volunteers, antinuclear protesters, hot lab manipulator-arm operators, public demonstrations, astronaut visits, professional bonding, health physicists, personal radiation safety, the Cold War, nuclear fear, and the research on nuclear rockets were all things that he experienced while at Plum Brook. The science of the book accurately portrayed a thriving United States test reactor in the 1960s, and his concerns about the impermanence of nuclear rocket research were predictive of the future. ...

Download Science In Flux: NASA's Nuclear Program at Plum Brook Station 1955-2005

PDF format, 3.5MB, 197Pages. NASA History Series.

Preface:

In 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 Sandusky, Ohio. I had been to this place before when I was writing a book on the history 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 performed.

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.” 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, weatheraltering devices, secret research, and even stories about UFO sightings beyond the guarded fences. 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 because NASA was doing “something secret” like “housing a flying saucer.”

Radioactive research often spawns tales of fear and conspiracy among its neighbors. I was eager to explore beyond the Plum Brook fences and enter its dormant and nearly deserted nuclear reactors that had sat unused for a quarter-century.

On the first day of research, once inside Plum Brook’s main gates, we drove down a narrow road through what scientists consider to be one of the best examples of natural prairie and forest in the Midwest. Its other important natural feature is that it sits on the alluvial plain and has the lowest level of seismic activity in the entire United States—an important geological feature for nuclear research. There were few people on site that day, and once we were away from the guardhouse and administration buildings, it was rare to see anyone else about. Plum Brook had once employed nearly 700 people, but by the late 1990s there were only 12 civil servants on site. When we finally emerged from the trees, we entered a grassy area to see the nuclear facility—once the second most powerful in the United States.

Typically one thinks of the massive hourglass-shaped cooling towers that define power reactors. But nothing of the exterior of the Plum Brook reactor indicated what was inside. There was only a low, domed structure tucked into a 117-acre site with a water tower, several adjoining office buildings, and temporary trailers housing workers. As we parked the car in the gravel lot, we had to verify that this was the right place.

I would later read accounts of others who had researched nuclear facilities and discovered that my first impression was not out of the ordinary. Hugh Gusterson, who wrote a study on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, experienced a similar initial reaction. He wrote, “When I first saw the laboratory, I was disappointed.

Instead of the conspicuous high security, industrial landscaping, and impressive modern architecture I had expected, I found a ragged, non-descript sprawl of scrubland and trailers punctuated by the occasional modern concrete-anddark- glass building.” The public perception of nuclear facilities and the true nature of life behind their fences are often at odds with each other. Plum Brook was much like the place that Gusterson described. Trees dominated a landscape disturbed only by sporadic, drab buildings, temporary worker trailers, and a domed building that hid inside its potential for unique scientific research.

There were two reactors at Plum Brook, the main “test” reactor, and a smaller “research” reactor. Our plan was to actually go inside the main reactor and try to envision what it used to do when it housed a vibrant nuclear research program in the 1960s. Before we could enter, protocol dictated that we listen to a lecture given in the trailers and read through a procedures manual about radiation safety. To ensure that we understood what we were told, we had to take a multiple-choice test, my first since my undergraduate days. After we passed the test, an engineer led us into the reactor security building, where we affixed pen-shaped dosimeters to our jacket pockets. These gauges could tell us if we were exposed to any unexpected sources of radiation. With a final warning not to eat or drink anything in the reactor (eating a meal next to a nuclear reactor was the last thing on our minds), our guide led us inside.

As we entered, the reactor we felt as if we had stepped back in time into the 1960s. It was like a modern-day ruins, an eerie Pompeii-like place where the material culture of its final days lay untouched, with papers still on desks, equations on blackboards, and tools left on workbenches. All Plum Brook nuclear research had ended abruptly in 1973, when the government canceled the program without warning, forcing nearly 700 scientists and engineers to begin looking for new jobs.

A skeleton crew consisting of only a few individuals ensured that the closed reactor remained environmentally safe for the next several decades. The government kept the reactor in this standby condition until 1998, when NASA finally allocated the funds and received the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) approval to decommission it. (The NRC’s Code of Regulations defines decommissioning as the “safe removal of a facility from service and reduction of residual radioactivity to a level that permits termination of the NRC license.”) The decommissioning team established an interconnected series of trailers just outside the reactor, which served as the base for their efforts. They informally called this trailer region “Timmy Town,” in reference to Tim Polich, the leader of the decommissioning team. He managed a group of experienced workers in the slow process of tearing down the reactors and transporting truckloads of contaminated waste to landfills in Utah and South Carolina.

Tom Junod, a former “health physics” officer at the facility, told me that he physics” was a term developed by Manhattan Project scientists during World War II to describe the mission of individuals whose job was “radiation protection.”) He said, “You almost feel like the place is haunted.”10 At the very least, it is like walking into an abandoned museum or a time capsule from the past. Posters from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI reminded the employees, “A theft from your government is a theft from YOU!” The engineers had built ashtrays into the walls next to each of the hot laboratory manipulator arms, because smoking during the handling of radioactive materials was then a common practice.

The massive control panel consisted of row after row of identically shaped buttons, with no apparent thought to ergonomic organization. It looked like the control room of the Star Trek Enterprise—the way the future looked as depicted by the original series back in the 1960s. It reminded me that visions of the future have an unusual way of becoming dated. The Plum Brook reactor was once state of the art. It now looked like a cannibalized museum relic.

As the Star Trek characters voyaged into the final frontier, we were exploring what once represented the leading edge of NASA’s nuclear frontier. Though obviously one was fictional and the other real, the two had one other element in common— rockets and the exploration of space. Inside the dome was the containment vessel, where for 11 years NASA had performed experiments on materials and devices to support the development of a nuclear rocket and nuclear electric power supplies for space exploration. One hoped-for application of this research was a planned nuclear rocket to transport humans to Mars.

Once we finished walking the empty halls, viewing the dry canals, and investigating the abandoned instruments, we walked toward the exit. On our way out we entered a room with two full-body radiation counters. Down the center of the room was a piece of tape. One side was contamination-free and the other was for all people or things exiting the reactor. Though the tape comically reminded me of Les Nesman from the 1970s sit-com WKRP, who defined his office walls in tape, the engineers stoically assured me that no one inadvertently crossed it—and neither did the contamination. Safety was a very serious issue, and no one seemed to appreciate the pop-culture reference. Even though our dosimeters read that we had encountered no radiation, we each stepped into full-body radiation machines to measure any minute traces of contamination that might be clinging to us. Alarmingly, my machine beeped when I was inside, and the electronic diagram of my body indicated potential high levels of contamination in the cranial region.

Before I could utter, “What does THAT mean?” the engineer guide reassured me that I had simply not placed my body properly in the device. I repositioned myself and was given the OK sign. I tried to pretend that this was a normal occurrence in my life.

I was ready to begin investigating the significance of the facility and telling the story of its life and death. But I left with many unanswered questions. Why had NASA built these reactors at Plum Brook? What did they do? Despite now being closed and inoperable for over 30 years, the main Plum Brook reactor is still today the eighth largest nuclear test facility that the United States has ever built. Why had the nuclear research ended so abruptly? What had the scientists and engineers accomplished with their experiments? Why was Plum Brook itself shrouded in mystery that made the conspiracy stories of Dan Brown seem plausible and the tales of mystery behind its fence common? And why was the government now spending over $150 million (and likely much more when the project is finally completed) to tear them down when it cost only one-tenth that amount to initially build them?

I was ready to begin my journey into the history of this nuclear relic from NASA’s golden age of space exploration.
As I finish writing this preface it is September 2005, fifty years to the month since Plum Brook broke ground on its nuclear reactor. Over the past half-century NASA’s reactor program at Plum Brook has had a compelling history, even though the reactors were engaged in research for approximately one-fifth of this time.

The telling of this story has required the assistance of a great number of people. I would first like to express my gratitude for the dedicated work of Robert Arrighi, who was my co-author on an earlier monograph on the Plum Brook nuclear reactor, NASA’s Nuclear Frontier.11 Although that book was primarily a photographic history, I used much of the research and oral interviews that we performed as a springboard for writing this book, Science in Flux. I also thank Dr. Virginia P. Dawson at History Enterprises, Inc., for her valuable insight into NASA history and her comments on successive drafts of the manuscript. Both Virginia and Robert also assisted with the interviews for this book.

Kevin Coleman, of NASA-Glenn Research Center, was indispensable for his coordination of this project and his advice throughout all phases of the research, writing, and photograph gathering. He is a true NASA asset. I also acknowledge the valuable assistance of Deborah Demaline, Jan Dick, Jim Polaczynski, Quentin Schwinn, and Bruce MacGregor of InDyne, Inc.; Michael Blotzer, chief of the Glenn Research Center’s Environmental Management Office; Rich Kalynchuk at Science Applications International Corporation; Project Manager Timothy J. Polich and Senior Engineer Keith M. Peecook of the Plum Brook Reactor Facility Decommissioning Team; Steve Dick, NASA Chief Historian; Stephen Garber at the NASA History Division; Roger Launius at the National Air and Space Museum; Galen Wilson and Scott Forsythe at the National Archives; Nan Card at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center; Deborah A. Macdonell of the United States District Court Northern District of Ohio (Toledo); Linda Gattshall at the Milan Public Library; Margaret Baughman of the Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection; Joanne Cornelius at the Cleveland State University Special Collections Department; Jerome Cooke at the Department of Energy; Judith A. Scalf and Patricia Bonecutter at the Northeastern Cooperative Regional Library Depository; Will Currie at the Firelands College Library; and all of the retirees from the Plum Brook Reactor Facility who graciously gave their time to be interviewed for the history projects. Lynn Patterson provided transcriptions for all of the interviews conducted for this book, as well as data entry services for some of the charts. She has been an important colleague of mine for nearly ten years.

A talented group of professionals handled the production of this book. Heidi Pongratz at Maryland Composition oversaw the copyediting of this book. Tom Powers and Stanley Artis at NASA Headquarters acted as invaluable coordinating liaisons with the graphic design group at Stennis Space Center. At Stennis, Angela Lane handled the layout with skill and grace, Danny Nowlin did an expert job proofreading, and Sheilah Ware oversaw the production process. Headquarters printing specialists Jeffrey McLean and Henry Spencer expertly handled this last and crucial stage of production.

A special debt of gratitude is owed to the manuscript reviewers (anonymous peer reviewers and NASA and former Plum Brook reactor employees) who provided important suggestions for this and the previous monograph. They include H. Brock Barkley, Jack Brooks, Earl Boitel, Bill Brown, Don Johnson, Jack Ross, Dean Sheibley, and James A. Dewar. A special recognition goes to Olga M. Dominguez, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Management Systems at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. Without her support, dedication, and foresight in the preservation of the history of this facility, this book would not have been possible.

This book is dedicated to my wife and daughter. My wife, Nancy, has always given me the freedom and support to follow my dreams, and we have been on a wonderful journey together for the past 15 years. Our five-year-old daughter, Isabelle, is a magical joy in our lives. Each night before bed she peers out her window, excitedly trying to find out what the Moon, or Luna as she affectionately calls it, looks like that evening. This joy and passion to explore the unknown of space, if even with the naked eye, is a common thread that unites all those who gave their lives and careers to NASA—an agency of critical importance to the United States. May those dreams
never be extinguished.

Mark D. Bowles
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
September 2005

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