Sunday morning and we were up before 7am again, after spotting another bull, we decided to search for an old secret nuclear site inside the Quehanna Wild Area.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 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". 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 for $181,250. Curtiss-Wright controlled 51,193 acres in a regular 16-sided polygon, which was easier to fence than a circular area.
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. Curtiss-Wright left in 1960, after which a succession of tenants further contaminated the nuclear reactor facility and its hot cells with radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90 and cobalt-60.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quehanna_Wild_Area
Great fun, driving forest roads and a muddy drive home.
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