Quehanna Wild Area - History - Atoms For Peace

Atoms For Peace

In a December 8, 1953, speech to the United Nations, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a new Atoms for Peace policy, and the United States Congress enacted his program into law the following year. Atoms for Peace "made funding accessible to anyone who had the imagination, if not the ability, to harness the atom's power for peaceful purposes". Under the new program, the airplane manufacturer Curtiss-Wright Corporation sought a large isolated area in central Pennsylvania "for the development of nuclear-powered jet engines and to conduct research in nucleonics, metallurgy, ultrasonics, electronics, chemicals and plastics". Curtiss-Wright worked closely with the state and, in June 1955, George M. Leader, the Governor of Pennsylvania, signed legislation that authorized the construction of a research facility at Quehanna. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sold Curtiss-Wright 8,597 acres (3,479 ha) for $181,250 ($22.50 an acre, $55.60 a hectare), and gave the company a 99-year lease on the remaining 42,596 acres (17,238 ha) at $30,000 a year. Curtiss-Wright controlled 51,193 acres (80.0 sq mi; 207.2 km2) in a regular 16-sided polygon, which was easier to fence than a circular area.

The state constructed $1.6 million of roads to the area; the Quehanna Highway was built on parts of an old CCC road, which followed an earlier logging railroad grade. Pennsylvania also canceled 212 camp site leases to help ensure security for the installation. Curtiss-Wright built three facilities on its land. The first was a nuclear research center with a nuclear reactor and six shielded radiation containment chambers for handling radioactive isotopes, referred to as hot cells, at the end of Reactor Road. The second was for jet engine trials and had two test cells with bunkers just north of Quehanna Highway, about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) apart. The northern test cell was at the center of the 16-sided polygon; even if a jet engine broke its moorings, it could not leave the polygonal area. Both of these were on the land which Curtiss-Wright had purchased, which was a regular octagon surrounded with a 24-mile (39 km) fence built by forest rangers, supervised from three guard houses on Quehanna Highway and Wykoff Run Road. The third installation was an industrial complex at the southeast edge of the polygon, in Karthaus Township, on the Quehanna Highway. At this site, a Curtiss-Wright division manufactured Curon foam for furniture and household products and used beryllium oxide to make high-temperature ceramics for application in the nuclear industry.

In 1956 Curtiss-Wright began isotope work at the facility, and The New York Times published two stories on the new nuclear research laboratory that year, followed by a November 1957 report that the one-megawatt nuclear reactor was completed. In 1958, the corporation received a twenty-year license from the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to operate a four-megawatt pool-type nuclear research reactor, and received permission from the Pennsylvania Sanitary Water Board to dispose of some radioactive waste in Meeker Run, a tributary of Mosquito Creek. The project was billed as "the greatest thing that ever happened in North Central Pennsylvania", and was expected to employ between 7,000 and 8,000 people. Curtiss-Wright spent $30 million on the project, and developed a community for its scientific and technical staff at the village of Pine Glen, southeast of Karthaus in Centre County.

By 1960 the Air Force had decided not to pursue nuclear-powered aircraft, and the federal government canceled $70 million in "high-altitude testing contracts" with Curtiss-Wright. By June 1960, the reactor was on standby and only 750 employees remained, 400 of which were in the Curon foam division; many engineers and scientists had already left. On August 20, 1960, Curtiss-Wright announced that it was donating the reactor facility to Penn State and selling its Curon foam division; the remaining 235 employees lost their jobs. Penn State, located about an hour south of Quehanna, had its own nuclear reactor, but intended to use the Quehanna facility for research and training.

The Curtis-Wright reactor was dismantled and its fuel returned to the AEC. Martin Company, which soon became Martin Marietta, leased the hot cells, intending to use them in the manufacture of small radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Curtiss-Wright warned Penn State "that the radiation involved in Martin's operations would be 'extremely high' and of a type that posed a particular risk to human health", but Curtiss-Wright itself had left both solid and liquid radioactive waste in the facility. Some of the Curtiss-Wright waste was contaminated with toxic beryllium oxide. Penn State had acquired the reactor license and with it came legal responsibility for the nuclear waste on the site; its plan with the AEC called for the release of 90 percent of the liquid radioactive waste into the environment and the burial of most radioactive solids on site. Items coated with beryllium oxide dust "were covered in plastic and buried out in the woods", where some were subsequently unearthed by black bears and white-tailed deer. Once jet engine testing stopped, the bunkers at the test cells were used "to store hazardous and explosive material".

In 1962 Martin Marietta began to manufacture Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) thermoelectric generators under a contract with the AEC; their AEC license allowed them to have up to 6 million curies of radioactive strontium-90 in the form of strontium titanate, which powered the SNAP generators. A SNAP-7 reactor made at Quehanna was used in the world's first nuclear-powered lighthouse, the Baltimore Harbor Light, from May 1964 to April 1966. In early 1963, Curtiss-Wright still owned or leased all of Quehanna and sublet land along Quehanna Highway to a firm that recovered copper from wire by burning off its insulation, a procedure that contaminated the soil. On July 12, 1963, Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton announced the termination of Curtiss-Wright's lease on 42,596 acres (17,238 ha); the state paid the company for the roads it had built, and Curtiss-Wright donated six of the eight buildings in the industrial complex to the state. In 1965 the state legislature passed an act declaring the former leased area a wilderness area, and Maurice K. Goddard, secretary of the Department of Forests and Waters, named it the Quehanna Wilderness Area.

Although Martin Marietta completed its AEC contract and its lease expired on December 21, 1966, it had to stay at the reactor site "until radiation contamination was brought to acceptable levels". Martin Marietta partially decontaminated the site and, in April 1967, undertook a joint radiological survey with Penn State and the AEC. The survey found "licensable quantities of strontium-90 stayed behind as structural contamination and residual radioactivity in piping and tanks, estimated at about 0.2 curies". This met the standards for that day, although Penn State did raise questions about the contamination remaining. Strontium is chemically very similar to calcium (both are alkaline earth metals) and can be absorbed by the body, where it is chiefly incorporated into bones. Strontium-90 decays by beta decay and has a half-life of 29 years; when it is in the body, its radioactivity can lead to bone cancer and leukemia.

Many in the conservation movement urged the state to buy back the land, especially after the Curtiss-Wright lease was canceled. In April 1967 Penn State vacated the site and gave the reactor complex to the state. Martin Marietta departed in June 1967, and early in that same year, Pennsylvania bought the remaining land back from Curtiss-Wright for $992,500, about $811,000 more than they had sold it for in 1955. Various usage plans for the area were proposed, including: a vacation resort with a large artificial lake, motels, golf courses, and honeymoon resort; a Penn State game preserve stocked with exotic animals like bison and boar; a large youth camp for several hundred children; and a radioactive waste disposal site. By November 1967, all of the land was back in the state forests and state game lands.