A short history lesson in US nuclear power...
The Birth of Nuclear Power in America
By Jack Kelly
americanheritage.com
When residents of western Pennsylvania awoke on December 18, 1957, 50 years ago today, they became the first Americans to make their breakfast toast with energy generated by nuclear fission. During the night, the Duquesne Light Company had brought on line the first large-scale commercial atomic generating plant, which had been built in the township of Shippingport, 38 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Many observers that day assumed the country was on the road toward a “golden age of Electricity,” as Westinghhouse Corporaton president Gwilym A. Price put it. We would soon enjoy clean, abundant energy from a source that would make electricity “too cheap to meter.” The technology didn’t live up to that billing during the ensuing decades, but global warming and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels are today prompting a second look at what seemed so promising half a century ago.
The Shippingport plant produced, in modern parlance, green energy. That was one reason it was built in the heart of Pennsylvania coal country. In the 1950s, Pittsburgh was known as the Smoky City because of the dirty fuel that drove its industry. Residents fed up with air pollution were fighting the construction of yet another coal-fired generating plant. Duquesne executives decided to participate in a government program to promote atomic power.
The roots of the project reached back 15 years to 1942, when Enrico Fermi and his colleagues first demonstrated the possibility of a controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their research was aimed at producing a weapon, and it culminated at Hiroshima.
A wartime commission charged with examining other potential uses for atomic power thought it might serve “for the propulsion of naval vessels” but was pessimistic about the commercial generation of electricity. Nuclear could not compete economically with conventional sources, the members concluded, and the country’s scarce supply of enriched uranium should be saved for building an atomic arsenal. As a result, both the Soviet Union in 1954 and Britain in 1956 beat the United States in starting up atomic power plants.
But in 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower made a speech at the United Nations in which he touted the concept of “Atoms for Peace.” The goal was “to hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of people.” He speculated that atomic power would “provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.”
America in the 1950s was not one of those areas. We were exporting $600 million worth of petroleum products yearly and generating electricity at less than a penny per kilowatt hour. The specter of the mushroom cloud haunted the atom, and executives at most private utilities were reluctant to pursue an unproven technology. Only government participation and subsidies could make atomic power a reality.
First Congress had to amend the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, which had given the government a monopoly on all aspects of the technology. The new act, passed in 1954, allowed private companies to own reactors.
Next, the federal government set up a partnership with Duquesne and the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. The Atomic Energy Commission would oversee Westinghouse’s design and manufacture of the reactor; Duquesne would provide the 500-acre site on the Ohio River and the generating machinery. The utility would pay for the energy at a rate competitive with conventional fuels.
In 1954 Eisenhower broke ground for Shippingport in atomic-age style by waving a neutron wand over a detector that sent a signal to a robotic bulldozer. Leading the project was Rear Adm. Hyman Rickover, who was also in charge of the creation of the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, christened the same year. In essence, he took that naval technology, enlarged it, and placed it on shore. His pressurized-water design consisted of a 58-ton uranium core inside a 33-foot-high, 9-foot-diameter pressure vessel. Water under 2,000 pounds of pressure transferred the heat from the core to a steam generator. The steam ran the utility’s turbines. For safety, much of the plant was built underground.
Shippingport was a technical success but a financial failure. It cost $84 million to build, on a $48 million budget. It produced electricity that cost seven times as much as that produced by conventional plants. Taxpayers, who had already invested $12 billion in atomic research, picked up the tab.
As the first of its kind, Shippingport was viewed as an experiment. It was designed to produce 60 megawatts of electricity, a far cry from the 1,000-megawatt plants that would come later. It had extra instrumentation that allowed engineers to study how a full-scale plant would operate. In 1977 they changed the reactor’s core to run it as a breeder reactor, which “bred” uranium fuel from more abundant thorium as it operated.
Shippingport also taught the industry about the procedures associated with decommissioning a reactor. During the 1980s it became the first commercial reactor to be shut down and dismantled. The cost of that was $98.3 million.
“There are a lot of things that can go wrong,” Rickover had stated during Shippingport’s construction. “All we have to have is one good accident in the United States and it might set the whole game back for a generation.” He was right. In 1979 an accident melted the core of the Three Mile Island reactor near Harrisburg, Pennyslvania, and brought down the curtain on Act I of the U.S. nuclear power industry.
Act II is about to begin. This September, two power companies planning a facility in Texas applied for the first full-scale nuclear power license in 29 years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive license applications for as many as 29 reactors at 20 sites over the next three years. Advanced technologies will make these plants safer, more efficient, and more versatile.
Uncertainties remain. Nuclear power is still expensive; the problem of waste disposal remains unsolved. But though Eisenhower’s optimistic vision continues to elude us, the reality of a nuclear role in our energy future appears to be certain.
—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).
americanheritage.com
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