The Plum Brook Reactor was a

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60 megawatt water-cooled and moderated research nuclear reactor, located in

Sandusky, Ohio Sandusky ( ) is a city in Erie County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie, Sandusky is located roughly midway between Toledo, Ohio, Toledo ( west) and Cleveland ( east). At the 2020 United Stat ...

, 50 mi west of the NASA

Glenn Research Center NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field is a NASA center within the cities of Brook Park, Ohio, Brook Park and Cleveland between Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the Rocky River Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks, with a s ...

(at that time the NASA Lewis Research Center) in

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, of which it was organizationally a part. The reactor was originally planned for the

NACA The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a United States federal agency that was founded on March 3, 1915, to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958, the agency was dissolved and its ...

nuclear airplane project. After that was cancelled in 1961, it became the primary NASA facility for space-related nuclear energy research and development. Experimental efforts included scientific and technical investigations of nuclear energy for spaceflight propulsion, nuclear power systems, and radiation exposure.NASA Plum Brook Reactor Facility
Great Images in NASA. The station included several large test facilities besides the reactor, including

liquid hydrogen Liquid hydrogen () is the liquid state of the element hydrogen. Hydrogen is found naturally in the molecule, molecular H2 form. To exist as a liquid, H2 must be cooled below its critical point (thermodynamics), critical point of 33 Kelvins, ...

facilities for development and testing of the

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upper stage. The reactor first went

critical Critical or Critically may refer to: *Critical, or critical but stable, medical states **Critical, or intensive care medicine * Critical juncture, a discontinuous change studied in the social sciences. *Critical Software, a company specializing i ...

on 14 June 1961, and was finally shut down on 5 January 1973. The facility's decommissioning began in 1998, and the last of its structures was demolished in May 2012. The entire process ultimately cost $253 million, significantly more than the

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-adjusted cost of constructing the facility.

References

{{reflist NASA facilities Sandusky, Ohio Nuclear research reactors Defunct nuclear reactors Light water reactors