by Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason
Maryland University Training Reactor. Sketch by Ji Kim.
When we told our colleagues and students that we would be touring the nuclear reactor at the University of Maryland, we were met with astonishment. Few people we spoke with had ever heard that there is a nuclear reactor on campus, much less an operational one that is run at least a few times per month, mostly by undergraduate and graduate students who become licensed operators during their time at UMD. Originally built in 1960, the Maryland University Training Reactor (MUTR)—referred to by our tour guide as a “toy reactor” due to its small stature and use for educational rather than power-generating purposes—encapsulates postwar nuclear history, an era in which shiny optimism about all things atomic proliferated.
On December 8, 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a now infamous speech before the UN General Assembly in New York City with the title “Atoms for Peace.”
1955 U.S. Stamp. Bureau of Printing and Engraving (Public Domain).
This was a significant turning point in the postwar ideological campaign to promote a nuclear future in the aftermath of the devastating horrors wrought by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the face of significant fears brought about by the escalating nuclear proliferation of the Cold War. Eisenhower’s speech recast the atomic age as one of promise and hope rather than threat and doom:
The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind. The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today. Who can doubt that, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage? (our emphasis)
In fact, U.S. support and financing of nuclear research both at home and abroad, under the sign of Atoms for Peace, had already galvanized the process of placing fissionable material into the hands of scientists and engineers, underscoring Eisenhower’s point that the nuclear future he envisioned was already well underway. Moreover, the Atoms for Peace campaign recast atomic warfare as a utopian mission that would not only provide widely-accessible and affordable energy but also miraculous medical innovations and scientific food production—evidenced by the seal used by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s:
Atoms for Peace Seal, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (Public Domain).
Three months before Eisenhower’s notorious speech, on September 5, 1953, the first campus research reactor opened at North Carolina State University, paving the way for a burgeoning network of small nuclear reactors built across the country (and eventually the world) to produce neutrons for research, education, and training. Atoms for Peace provided the first nuclear reactors to Israel (1960), Pakistan (1965), and Iran (1967), equipment that was—in one of the escalating ironies that suffuse nuclear history—built and installed by a leading manufacturer of recreational equipment at the time, American Machine and Foundry, which also pioneered the automated bowling pinsetter (that’s the same AMF known for its worldwide chain of bowling centers).
In the U.S., the development of research reactors proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s, in an era when the Atomic Energy Commission underwrote scholastic grants for training nuclear scientists and engineers. By the late 1970s there were approximately 70 research reactors at U.S. institutions of higher education, chiefly on the campuses of land-grant universities. The Atoms for Peace message about the universal benefits of atomic science resonated with the land-grant universities’ founding egalitarian principles of affordable, accessible, and practical education for and with the involvement of local communities. New research reactors continued to be installed on campuses into the 1990s. However, in the twenty-first century—in the context of the privatization and financialization of the public university system—factors such as budget cuts, the downsizing of faculty and staff, the slashing of nuclear science and engineering programs, and the costs associated with updating equipment have led to the decommissioning of many research reactors. Today, 27 campus research reactors remain operational.
In May 2019, we had the opportunity to visit one of them, the Maryland University Training Reactor, located on our own campus in College Park, just a short walk downhill from where we work, in a midcentury building that also houses offices and classrooms. MUTR is an early model 250kW TRIGA reactor produced by General Atomics, installed in 1970 to upgrade the first 10kW campus reactor, which had been operational since August 1960. To visit the reactor, we entered through a foyer filled with nuclear relics, part of the Koeth Collection, an archive of atomic-age curiosities assembled by the former director of MUTR, Professor Tim Koeth. Professor Koeth has been developing his collection for over thirty years, and it includes an amazing array of ephemera: glow-in-the-dark uranium glass (also known as “depression glass”); radioactive Fiestaware treated with depleted uranium; more than 100 radiation detectors, dosimeters, and Geiger counters; uranium prospecting equipment; artifacts related to the Manhattan project; a boxed miniature of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant for use with model trains; and a 1946 Adrian X-Ray Company Shoe-Fitting Flouroscope, one of many devices installed in shoe stores around the world during the mid-20th century to measure foot size via x-ray, before it was determined that radiation exposure for shoe sizing was not such a great idea (the machines were banned in the 1970s). The items included in the collection offer a poignant reminder of both the hopes that once inhered in nuclear futures and the risks they have always posed.
After examining the collection, we filled out some paperwork required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of all visitors to nuclear reactors for safety and security purposes. (We were assured by our guide that the research reactor is “inherently safe,” but we still had to verify that we weren’t pregnant to enter.) Accompanied by a dosimeter, also a regulatory requirement, we entered the main reactor room through secure doors. A “swimming-pool”-style reactor, MUTR is essentially a large, cylindrical tank made of concrete and aluminum that rises two stories high; it is open at the top, and from a platform reached by climbing a set of stairs, we peered down into the water, through which the reactor’s core is visible. The reactor was not running on the day we toured, but we got a thorough look at the equipment, including the 1970s-era console that is still used in operating the reactor. With its analog read-outs, light-up buttons, and beige metal casing, the console looks more like something we might have used in high-school AV club than equipment for monitoring the sophisticated mechanisms of nuclear science. In fact, we learned from our tour guides that spare parts for the console are no longer manufactured, so when things break, the operators purchase replacements on eBay.
MUTR Control Console. Sketch by Ji Kim.
As the story of nuclear reactor parts bought and sold on eBay suggests, like the Koeth Collection of nuclear ephemera, MUTR itself appears to be something of a relic. The campus research reactor program is the legacy of an era before Chernobyl and Fukushima permanently tarnished the rosy vision of a nuclear future that Eisenhower sought to perpetuate, but it also recalls a time when the public mission of education and research figured more centrally in the work of the land-grant university. Today, the precarity of that mission is visible not only on our own side of campus, where funding for research, staff, and facilities in the humanities is at a minimum, but also—unexpectedly for us—in the operations of MUTR, with its skeleton crew, outdated equipment, and anachronistic air.
***Special thanks to Ji Kim, artist and tech guru extraordinaire, for her wonderful drawings and all her assistance in getting this project off the ground.
Thank you for making readers aware of and putting into context this little known piece of UMD and land grant university history. I can’t help but compare its near invisibility on campus with that of radiation, the background, like weapons stockpiles and aging reactors everywhere, no longer of narratives like Eisenhower’s but of something also hard to see.