Abstract
Introduction
Science museums have traditionally purported to represent universality, engaging audiences through material culture and other media with general truths about the physical world. And yet each museum is particular, linked to specific places and people not only by the circumstances of their origin and present context, but also by the singular trajectories of the objects it holds (Alberti, 2022).
As part of this special issue devoted to exploring the tension between universal and localized science museum practice, this study reveals how technical artefacts (a personal dosimeter and its charging unit) bring the specifics of place (Northern Scotland) and time (the closing years of the Cold War) to a collection (National Museums Scotland). The use-life of this radiation detection equipment links the museum to the geographical specificity of the development of nuclear power in Northern Britain. The museum afterlife of these artefacts shows how localized science and technology are represented in museum displays: first in a specific scientific context, and then in a multidisciplinary setting.
This paper traces the technical and functional origins of the artefacts in the context of the relationship between nuclear power and the Cold War, placing these supposedly universal devices in a local setting. It then explores the heritage pathway of the dosimeter and charger through selection, acquisition and exhibition—throughout which they were subject to tension between the general and the specific. Following this twin object biography, the paper concludes with reflections on how these objects carry with them (or are ascribed) regional or universal meanings, as well as what they reveal about mundanity in museums and how the experience of everyday risk during the Cold War may manifest in a museum.
Universal devices in a specific place
The objects in question were in use at the end of the Cold War, but to understand their development, we need to look back to their roots. Quartz fibre dosimeters were developed in the 1930s to measure the cumulative dose of ionizing radiation. Small, pen-like devices, charged before each use to re-zero, they were usually worn by individuals working with (potential) radioactivity. Deployed by the state for both civilian and military purposes, they were in widespread use in Britain by the 1950s (Gordon, 1961). R.A. Stephen & Company of Mitcham, near London, dominated in their manufacture and continued to develop the technology over the subsequent decades (Cooper and Tymons, 1972; Hawley, 1965; for an international comparison, see Barahona, 2022).
Radiation was an immaterial and invisible marker of the Cold War, which featured the superpower conflict that had developed between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies in the aftermath of the Second World War. While the Cold War manifested in proxy conflicts in South-East Asia, the ‘imaginary war’, involving North America, Europe and the Soviet Union was characterized by the threat of nuclear weapons and the radioactive devastation they would cause (Grant and Ziemann, 2016). The development of dosimeters and other methods of detecting radiation was a technical way to manage the fear of nuclear weapons (for perspectives from the history of science, see Creager, 2013; Hamblin, 2007; on domestic risk, see Douthwaite, 2022).
Stephen's dosimeters, however, were also designed for use in the more optimistic deployment of atomic technology: civilian nuclear power, the by-product of the development of nuclear weapons. Britain promised to be a world leader in the generation of this abundant, cheap, clean energy. With its industrial supremacy threatened by friend and foe alike, the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) threw itself into the new nuclear science, and the first full-scale atomic power station in the world powered up at Calder Hall (now Sellafield) on the north-west coast of England in 1956. Two years later, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) opened a Scottish plant at Chapelcross on the site of a Royal Air Force (RAF) aerodrome in Dumfriesshire.
As a country within the UK, Scotland had a complex relationship with the government in London and was the subject of accelerating debates about independence during the Cold War period, which would eventually lead to a devolved government in Edinburgh. In nuclear terms, Scotland arguably played a disproportionate role (by population at least) in British plans for both weapons and power (Alberti et al., 2024). It had an extensive coastline, an abundance of lochs and low population density (at least outside the central belt), making it an ideal location for both developing nuclear power and housing nuclear weapons. Geographically, Scotland overlooked the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap, a tactically important route to the North Atlantic, and housed American and British nuclear submarines near Glasgow (Figure 1).
Mapping Cold War Scotland, designed for
Nine more Magnox reactors followed those at Calder Hall and Chapelcross, intended to generate both domestic nuclear energy and plutonium for nuclear weapons. Judging them inefficient, however, the UK Government set out to develop a more effective ‘fast’ reactor, which would generate more nuclear fuel than it consumed, thanks to the fissile reaction in its core. Another former RAF airstrip at Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland was a promising site. With plentiful seawater nearby and few settlements, it was as far from London on the mainland as possible to minimize the risk of radiation exposure to the capital. Three nuclear reactors were constructed at the Dounreay Nuclear Power Development Establishment over the course of 50 years, each more technologically advanced than the last (Grant and Gunn, 2025; Paterson, 2008). Next door, the Vulcan Naval Reactor Test Establishment also tested military technology, as befitted Scotland's status as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) forward base (Royle, 2019).
The reactors brought fear and risk to Northern Scotland. Risk was manageable; fear was less so. Even among the early optimism about nuclear power, there were growing concerns about safety and radiation hazards for those working in and living near nuclear sites (Welsh, 1993). Locals in Thurso expressed concerns about the dangers of radiation, especially after a fire at Windscale next to Calder Hall in 1957 (Ross, 2019). One local worker at the site remembered, ‘it was all new to us. I mean the whole concept of radiation and contamination was something that we had never touched on at all before’ (Harper, 2014).
Dounreay generally had a good safety track record. But in 1977, an explosion in a 20-year-old active material waste shaft blew off its five-tonne concrete lid, scattering radioactive particles over a wide area (Dounreay Corporate Report, 2023; Edwards, 1995). This accident came to light only decades later; but the risks of the 1986 explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, first detected by Western European scientists, were eventually very public. In Scotland and across Northern Europe, irradiated topsoil led to the slaughter of thousands of livestock.
It was in this context of growing public awareness of the risks of nuclear power and the operational life of the third Prototype Fast Reactor (1974–1994) that the dosimeter in question came into use at Dounreay (Figure 2). Its charger was a Model 4800 NATO device with the unique serial number 8003700. The charger was stocked, coded and tracked not only by the UKAEA (Asset number MFH-I-201-08) but also by NATO via its National Stock Number 6665-99-763-2053. A method for standardizing military procedures and equipment, this number identified its material group (66, instruments and laboratory equipment), its class (65, hazard-detecting instruments and apparatus), its country (99, UK) and its sequence number, which identified the particular device (see SAP, 2023). As one of many in use on site, the gamma/X-ray quartz fibre electrometer also had a simpler coding, a Plant Identity Number (PIN) handwritten on a sticker on the device.
Museum object T.2011.52: a charging unit for personal dosimeter and quartz fiber electrometer used at Dounreay Nuclear Power Station (from National Museums Scotland).
The twin artefacts were thereby marked by a hierarchy of bureaucracy, from international (NATO) through national (UKAEA), to the hyper-local (PIN). These would later give the museum they eventually arrived at the challenge and opportunity to balance the devices’ universality and locality. The PIN also reveals a key chronological element of the dosimeter's object life: that it was used in 1989—just as the Cold War was reaching its surprisingly swift conclusion with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. The devices were used locally during a significant global milestone.
In addition to illuminating geography, these objects tell of everyday life during this pivotal period— the close of the Cold War—and the role of risk management in the nuclear industry. In both military and civilian realms, these small, mundane devices managed concerns about radiation: they were metrological manifestations of health and safety. Unlike personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves, they did not directly protect the human body; instead, they served as warnings, rendering the invisible visible. Not that a fibre dosimeter sounded any alarm; rather, it was activated before use, then read after wear to ascertain whether the maximum dose had been exceeded. Its silent materiality was intended to reassure (for as long as the dosage remained low). Clipped onto a jacket, it became part of the wearer's clothing, and so, like the Walkman portable music systems that were so popular at the time, we might think of it as wearable discourse (Ryan, 2014). As much as the pens and pencils it might sit next to in a lab coat pocket, the dosimeter was both a practical tool and a powerful signifier of status, a visible symbol of the credibility of the ‘atomics’, as Dounreay workers were known (Ross, 2019). As part of a management system of occupational safety and health, this unassuming artefact provided a sensory means of knowing; it materialized risk management (Pink et al., 2014). Reassuringly, there is no evidence that this electrometer was ever activated. It completed its function silently and unchangingly; as a result, it was safe to collect and to move with the charger into the next chapter of their biography—their heritage afterlife.
The lengthy and expensive process of decommissioning Dounreay began in 2007. It is still ongoing and will take several decades to complete, costing considerably more than the original construction. Although the decision was already made when the Scottish National Party came to power in May 2007, this was characteristic of the devolved Scottish Government's approach to energy. As the nations within the UK adjusted their positions, this was another local manifestation of (inter)national shifts.
One relatively small element of this massive decommissioning programme was its heritage workflow, which paid attention to preserving the history and culture of the site. Dounreay appointed an archivist, James Gunn, a long-standing member of staff with an interest in the site's history, who set about recording, interviewing and collecting. This was an early manifestation of what would become a larger programme that Egle Rindzevičiūtė dubbed ‘Nuclear Cultural Heritage’, for ‘while nuclear decommissioning entails disassembling reactors, taking down buildings, cleaning up landscapes, it is also about creating values through documentation, archiving and selective preservation of nuclear material culture’ (Rindzevičiūtė, 2022: 13). Despite the risks of radioactivity and a culture of secrecy, these values are created—and heritage is constructed—in the dialogue between the nuclear industry and the cultural sector. ‘We can’t really donate stuff that is active or potentially radioactive,’ reflected Gunn, ‘so we [have to] double check to make sure there's no activity and contamination involved. So that does stop us donating some things’ (Gunn, 2021). The dosimeter, perhaps ironically, would have been checked for radiation before it left the site. Gunn would then circulate lists of checked items for potential transfer to collections, especially the local museum in Thurso (then Caithness Horizons, now the North Coast Visitor Centre) and national organizations, including the Science Museum in London.
One party to this co-construction, an early and active member of the network, was National Museums Scotland (NMS). This multidisciplinary heritage organization, with its mission to ‘bring the world to Scotland and Scotland to the world’, houses the largest collections of natural history, decorative arts, social history and archaeology in Scotland. Counting among its predecessors the Industrial Museum of Scotland, it also has the most extensive science and technology collection in the UK after the Science Museum in London. Some 3000 items from this part of the collection are on display at the flagship site, the National Museum of Scotland in central Edinburgh. These science and technology galleries within a museum of wider scope therefore, in effect, constitute the largest science museum in Scotland. Most of the collection, however, is housed in the National Museums Collection Centre, 6 kilometres north of the city.
In 2007, NMS purchased glass artist Kate Williams's uranium glass sculpture of the iconic sphere that surrounded the Dounreay Fast Reactor (Figure 3). In the years that followed, NMS provided advice to the decommissioning programme at Dounreay and acquired objects from the site, from the entire fittings of a control room to (non-radioactive) fuel elements. In 2011, physicist and NMS curator Tacye Phillipson spotted the dosimeter when reviewing one of Gunn's lists. As a curator of recent science, Phillipson's task was to select representative artefacts from a profusion of available contemporary and near-contemporary material culture (Alberti et al., 2018; Fredheim et al., 2020). This seemingly uninspiring pair of items appealed not only because they chimed with the institution's interest in Dounreay as an element of Scottish history, but also because they fitted well with the museum's track record in collecting metrology, from historic weights to petrol pumps (Connor and Simpson, 2004). Further, the devices aligned with Phillipson's own interest in radioactivity, a phenomenon that is inherently difficult to collect material on, given its risks (which she knew well as the museum's certified Radiation Protection Supervisor), but which monitoring technology offers a way to engage and record. These devices are not uncommon—there is a market for ‘vintage’ radiation detectors (Radiation Readiness, 2024)—but the example from Dounreay appealed because it had a relevant geographical story. It would complement existing artefacts in the collection, including a series of dosimeters used by the Royal Observer Corps in Edinburgh during the Cold War (Harper, 2024).
Sculpture of Dounreay Power Station, Kate Williams, 2007 (from National Museums Scotland).
Phillipson assigned the charging unit and dosimeter new, heritage codes (T.2011.52.1 and T.2011.52.2.) to overlay their UKAEA and NATO categorizations. These codes tell us that they were the 52nd group of items accessioned by the science and technology curators in the year 2011 (who had inherited the prefix ‘T’ from their predecessor, the curatorial technology department), and that they were considered two parts of one whole. Phillipson wrote these details in the physical accession ledger, added them to the ‘Adlib’ collection management system, and, in due course, they appeared in the online catalogue (National Museums Scotland, 2011a; National Museums Scotland, 2011b).
These everyday items thus became sacrosanct, no longer worn on the body but handled only with care and with gloves, to be kept for posterity according to NMS's statutory duty (
As pieces of heritage, the charging unit and dosimeter have played roles in two exhibitions—the first general, the second geographically specific. In 2011, Phillipson selected them for the
The charger and dosimeter travelled 6 kilometres south in the museum van to be installed among a range of technologies intended to show ‘how our lives are affected by technologies that have been developed in the past 200 years. From transport to medicine, and radio to computers … ideas that have changed lives’ (Anon., 2011). Phillipson selected the charger and dosimeter as part of the ‘Exploring the invisible’ section, for the ‘radioactive’ case alongside some microscopy apparatus (Figure 4). She explained this juxtaposition in the accompanying text: Understanding the properties of light waves and invisible particles has enabled scientists and inventors to create technologies that have transformed our lives—from x-rays and nuclear power to polarising sunglasses and colour photography … Radiation today has become part of everyday life but continues to be controversial following accidents such as the 1986 [Chornobyl] and 2011 Fukushima power plant disasters.
1
The “radio-active” case layout from
The display was dismantled in 2014, and the artefacts were returned to the National Museums Collection Centre. There they might have remained, but for the genesis of a research project later in the decade, called ‘Materialising the Cold War’. The project was a collaboration between NMS and the University of Stirling and was rooted in the investigators’ interests in the science and technology collections, which included Royal Observer Corps material, nuclear weaponry and the material culture of the nuclear industry. After preliminary surveying work and a proof-of-concept doctoral study (Alberti and Nehring, 2022; Harper, 2022), and with support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, a small team set out to explore the ways museums collect and display material culture associated with the Cold War, and how audiences respond.
With partners in England, Norway and Germany, the project's methodological and historical remit was focused on Northern Europe (Douthwaite et al., 2024). However, ‘Materialising the Cold War’ also set out to engage NMS audiences with the impact of the Cold War on Scotland. This gave rise to events in Edinburgh: a school programme and three short online films. Alongside others devoted to understanding the politics and social impact of the Cold War, one film focused on how nuclear weapons and power shaped Scottish life and landscape (National Museums Scotland, 2023). A section devoted to nuclear power plants was filmed in the National Museums Collection Centre and featured relevant objects from the collection that were not usually on display, including a control panel from the Hunterston plant on the Firth of Clyde (Figure 5) and an isotope calculator from Dounreay. Also from Dounreay, to illustrate the risks of ‘explosion’, a brief close-up of the ‘charging unit for a personal dosimeter, used to detect radioactivity on and around personnel at Dounreay Nuclear Power Station [sic]’ was featured (National Museums Scotland, 2023: 1 minute 35 seconds).
Control panel from the Hunterston A Magnox nuclear reactor (from National Museums Scotland).
The charger, which had attracted attention since the beginning of the project and had been brought back and forth from its shelf for discussion and examination, had now moved as far as the conservation workshop in the building. It had spent the 14th of April 2023 there, sitting on a trolley where it was closely filmed for nearly an hour, for the sake of a few seconds’ footage. Although the dosimeter was also on the trolley, only the charger featured in the film, focusing on the codes and titles written on it, so that viewers could immediately grasp its function.
Both devices also travelled to the photography studio next door, so that an image of them could appear in the short book,
Films and books were part of a multi-platform offer to the audience that had at its heart an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, led by NMS technology curator Meredith Greiling. Planning was underway even before the ‘Materialising the Cold War’ project had formally started, as NMS staff discussed themes and potential objects. The dosimeter and charger were almost wilfully mundane, but they helped the team in its intention to use objects from the collection to illustrate everyday life as well as technical innovations, providing multiple perspectives rather than focusing solely on famous voices. Visitors could find heroic stories of science elsewhere in the museum (including stories of Scottish Nobel Prize winners); the dosimeter and charger offered mundane entanglements. They were early candidates for the exhibition and survived months of the selection process to make Greiling's final cut.
And so, in June 2024, the pair of objects travelled back to the National Museum of Scotland to be installed in the exhibition. They were accompanied by the isotope calculator, but not the Hunterston control panel, which was too tall to fit into the exhibition space. The room in question, ‘Special Exhibition Gallery 2’ (SEG2), was the smaller of two spaces in the National Museum of Scotland used for changing exhibitions (at 120 square metres). SEG2 is free to access. A larger gallery was initially considered for the exhibition, but, in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NMS elected not to stage a potentially sensitive display in the paid-for space. This decision highlighted that, while the exhibition is historical, heritage is always about the present.
In July 2024, the dosimeter and charger were once again illuminated upon the opening of the exhibition
After an introductory video, visitors to
The nuclear section of
Wilesco R200 Automkraftwerk steam powered nuclear power station toy, by Wilhelm Schroder and Co., West Germany, 1965 (from National Museums Scotland).
Sitting on their own plinth underneath the isotope calculator were the charging unit and the electrometer. The red of the UKAEA label matched the frame of the toy power station and the rims of the plates. This was a ‘personal dosimeter and charging unit’, explained Greiling on the label: Every employee at Dounreay nuclear facility was issued with a dosimeter. Worn in a top pocket like a pen, it recorded an individual's exposure to potentially harmful radioactivity. As Peter Higginson, a physicist at Dounreay remembers[,] ‘you learnt to live with radioactivity’. (Higginson and Higginson, 2015; National Museums Scotland, 2024)
And yet, curatorial intention does not always translate to audience experience. It is difficult to assess whether visitors perceived the charger and dosimeter as universal or specific, and it is challenging to judge the impact of the pair of artefacts more generally. At the time of writing, nearly 200,000 people have visited
Neither passive audience response gathering (via an electronic survey in the gallery) nor proactive visitor interviews have yielded specific responses about that case or the dosimeter. Likewise, the viewers of the video featuring the dosimeter have yet to register any opinion. The video will remain available, however, and the exhibition is still open at the time of writing; perhaps their subtle effects may yet register. Once the exhibition ends, the dosimeter and charger will then return to the quiet confines of the National Museums Collection Centre.
Whether or not the journey of the dosimeter and charger is over, their story so far provides a number of perspectives on science museums in the cultures in which they are located. Furthermore, as the ‘Materialising the Cold War’ team suggests, by ‘examining the biography of an object, we can consider its creation, use life and museum life to understand how Cold War meanings have become attached to it’ (Douthwaite and Harper, 2024: 9). A dosimeter is in principle a universal instrument, deployed across nation-states that have use nuclear power since the late 20th century (see Barahona, 2022).
Even in the very specific context of Dounreay, there were many dosimeters in use over the lifespan of the facility. That it is this particular one on display shows the role of serendipity and personal choice in the constitution of science and technology collections: Gunn selected this dosimeter from among many; Phillipson chose these items from a list of options; and Greiling finally picked them for the exhibition. Science museums evidence natural laws by relying on individuals’ passions and positions; their choices of location and of things shape the science museums, which thereby show geographically specific evidence of a de-localized enterprise. Science museums show that science is richly human and contingent. Individual biographies, whether of people or things, have the potential to connect the specific to the general on display (or on screen, or in a museum catalogue), connecting materiality to history, the local to the universal, and audiences to stories. This humanizes science communication (Alberti, 2022).
The stories told in this way are not always immediately exciting, however. The unassuming dosimeter and charger show that science generally, and science on display specifically, is not only about stunning innovations and discoveries, but also the ordinary and the humdrum. Radioactivity became part of the everyday lives of workers at Dounreay, who wore dosimeters as a matter of course. In Higginson's words, they ‘learnt to live’ with radiation risk (Higginson and Higginson, 2015). Many technical things become utterly mundane—telephones, for example—but if museums are to represent the relationship between science and society, they need to collect them, overcome their drab appearance, and tell their stories in an engaging way. This is how science collectors navigate the oceans of profusion, searching for specific examples with rich local stories.
What is unusual about these particular mundane objects is the way in which they materialize risk. The dosimeter's inert silence speaks to the everyday experience of the Cold War in Scotland, but its unrealized potential alludes to the devastatingly extraordinary events involving nuclear power: the explosion at Dounreay, the Windscale accident, and, further afield, the Chornobyl disaster. This makes it more compelling as a display object (although there is no evidence of this in the audience research to date) and important to collect as a historic text. A device like this materializes health and safety on the one hand, but is evidence of fear on the other. This fear connects the civilian application of nuclear technology to the fear of its military application—nuclear weapons. In the exhibition, the dosimeter and charger sat among the material culture of hope for nuclear power, but as manifestations of fear, they foreshadowed the NBC suit and the fallout map around the corner. This exhibition theme was also localized, speaking to Scotland's strategic location during the Cold War. Inscribed by both UKAEA and NATO, the charging unit embodied both the civilian and the military.
In their museum setting—whether in the collection facility or on display—these small risk-management tools manifest the hopes and fears of Cold War Scotland. They link the civilian and military development of nuclear technology in the context of the global superpower conflict to local everyday life on the windswept coast of a small country.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
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