Science in Flux: NASA's Nuclear Program at Plum Brook Station, 1955–2005 (review)

The image that graces the dust jacket of Science in Flux—a goofy 1959 rendering of an atomic spaceship—suggests not what one cold war nuclear research facility actually achieved, but everything it could not. Erected on an old TNT works in seismically somnolent Sandusky, Ohio, the federal government's Plum Brook Station operated only from 1963 to 1973, and it closed with neither a bang nor a whimper; rather, it disappeared into a probability cloud. According to Mark Bowles's exhaustive biography of this laboratory (winner of the 2005 Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics History Manuscript Award), some labs have more to tell scholars through their disuse than through their use. Locals once feared that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was hiding UFOs in Plum Brook's dormant containment vessels, but Bowles reveals more sinister ghosts lurking at the derelict station: low-level radiation and the decline of "big science."

That said, Plum Brook achieved about as much as any laboratory founded on an intelligence failure. In the mid-1950s, belief that a nuclear-powered airplane was practical in the near-term—and that the Soviet Union already had one—triggered a crash program in radiation research by the precursor to NASA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Although the experts were wrong on both counts, by the time Plum Brook's main fission reactor went critical, a contest to build spaceships had replaced the one for long-range airplanes, and NASA's only nuclear test facility appeared well suited to support this new effort. If many recall President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to explore the Moon, Bowles remarks, few remember that Kennedy advocated, in the same speech, the development of nuclear-powered rockets.

Beginning in 1963, Plum Brook's researchers studied the effects of neutron radiation—the "flux" of the book's title—on materials and components destined for atomic engines and other space-based reactors. As Bowles points out, though, Plum Brook science was both of flux and in flux. Where Plum Brook's original NACA mandate had weak technical underpinnings but a broad political mandate, projects like the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) were scientifically workable but shielded by paper-thin congressional support. By 1972, Plum Brook had become both peripheral to NASA's space exploration plans and, as radiation factory, a growing environmental menace. Already committed to funding the space shuttle, NASA pulled the plug on Plum Brook, mothballing the site instead of pursuing a more costly decommissioning. The facility may yet prove useful, but it now sits, mostly dismantled, as part of NASA's Glenn (formerly Lewis) Research Center.

Even though one might expect Plum Brook's staff to have been a fatalistic bunch, they wept when their world-class main reactor went cold. The facility's 700 researchers (most of them engineers) loved working at Plum Brook and were proud of its safety record. Even Myrna Steele liked being there, despite enduring endless teasing for being both a woman and—even worse—a physicist. Insightful insiders always suspected, however, that NASA might close the place at any time. While Plum Brook trained a generation of nuclear engineers and performed valuable materials tests and chemical analyses, the facility made no major scientific discoveries and took its research cues from elsewhere. Work on portable nuclear generators yielded usable space hardware, but NERVA never advanced beyond design studies and test reactors.

Scattered around the world in labs and college campuses, research reactors produce no electricity, just data and headaches, and Bowles is quite right that few historians have written about them. Connecting Plum Brook's story to the growing body of work on engineering practice, twentieth-century technoscience, and nuclear history, Bowles deserves a great deal of credit for demonstrating such admirable fidelity to a challenging subject. His story has the narrative arc of an episode of VH1's...