NASA’s Nuclear Frontier - The Plum Brook Reactor Facility, 1941—2002

By Mark D. Bowles and Robert S. Arrighi

Monographs in Aerospace History Series, No. 33, 2004

NASA SP-2004-4533, 2004, Soft Cover, 100p, $45.00

This book is a visual history of the Plum Brook reactor, including numerous images and captions, a narrative history, and selected primary documents. It begins with the acquisition of the Plum Brook farmland by the government at the start of World War II and discusses its use as significant ordnance works for the war effort. At the same time, scientists worldwide were making tremendous progress on a roughly fifty-year investigation of the mysterious world inside the atom and the enormous reserve of power it appeared to contain. This work culminated in the atomic bomb. After the war, as Plum Brook’s ordnance factories went silent, scientists continued their pursuit of nuclear knowledge by constructing test reactors. One specific aim for this research in the 1950s was to build a nuclear-powered airplane. To support this effort, in 1956 NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), began to design and build a massive test reactor at Plum Brook.