NASA's Nuclear Program at Plum. Brook Station 1955 - 2005 b Mmk D. Bowles The NASA History Series National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA History Division Office of External Relations Washington, DC June 2006 NASA SP-2006-431 7 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-2006-43 17) 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. 11. Title. 111. NASA SP-2006-43 17. TK9230.B69 2006 621.48072'073--dc22 2006005497 For Nancy and habelle le of on tents Preface vii Introduction xu 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 S Preface L June 2001 I was part of a group of historians and archivists visiting NASKs idyllic-sounding Plum Brook Station, located in the rural countryside outside San- dusky, 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.’ 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 scientificc over-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, weather- altering devices, secret research, and even stories about UFO sightings beyond the guarded fence^.^ 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 ’ Virginia E Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, Taming Liquid Hydrogen (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2004-4230, 2004). John Mangels, “NASA Testing Facilities Count Rivals Among Customers,” Newhome 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,” %e Plain Dealer (28 November 2000): 1B. Dan Brown, Deception Point (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), pp. 371-373,493. 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 because NASA was doing “something secret” like “housing a flying saucer.”*R adio- active 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 re~earchT.~h ere 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 hous- ing 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 dis- appointed. 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-and- dark-glass building.”6T he 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. * Robert Kozar, quoted in Ulysses Torassa, “10,9,8,7 . . . Little-Known Ohio NASA Facility Tests New Rockets, Jet Engines,” De Plain Dealer (19 April 1998): lJ, Michael Mecham, “Big Room, Big Vacuum,” Aviation Week & Space Technology 159, 1 (7 July 2003): 46. Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 25. viii 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 mate- rial 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 reac- tor remained environmentally safe for the next several decades. The government kept the reactor in this standby condition until 1998, when NASA finally allo- cated the funds and received the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) approval to decommission it. (The NRC‘s Code of Regdations 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 li~ense.”T)~h e 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 ’ John L. Minns and Michael T. Masnik, “Staff Responses to Frequently Asked Questions Concerning Decommissioning of Nuclear Power Reactors,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission, June 2000, Box 8, Folder 6, Plum Brook Archives. John C. Kuehner, “NASA Reactors Take Final Voyage,” %e Phin Dealer (27 June 2002): B10. ix