Today is a double anniversary for nuclear energy: the first man-made sustained nuclear chain reaction and the first full-scale nuclear power plant.
1942: Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and their colleagues achieve a successful controlled chain reaction in a squash court underneath the University of Chicago football grandstand. It lays the groundwork for the first atomic bombs (see here). The secret Manhattan Project brought top U.S. scientists to Chicago to create a nuclear chain reaction, starting with a controlled, nonexplosive one. Remarkably, the experiment was conducted within a big city.
On December 2, a three-man suicide squad was ready to douse the reactor in case it threatened to get out of control. Besides the main on/off switch, there was a weighted safety rod that would automatically trip if neutron intensity got too high, a hand-operated backup safety rod, and SCRAM—the safety-control-rod ax-man, who would cut a rope to drop the safety rod if all else failed. The suicide squad wasn’t needed. The pile achieved a sustained nuclear reaction, and Fermi shut it down after twenty-eight minutes. It would be two and a half years before the world knew it had changed.
1957: The first U.S. nuclear plant goes to full power at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
An experimental breeder reactor devised by Chicago Pile–1 veteran Walter Zinn had created the first nuclear-generated electricity in 1951, and the Soviets opened a small nuclear power plant in 1954 (see here). President Dwight Eisenhower broke ground that year for the first full-scale commercial plant, to be operated by Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Light Company.
The Westinghouse-designed plant used nuclear fission to heat water, which converted the water in a secondary system into steam, which drove the turbine that created the electricity. Shippingport shipped its first power into the Pittsburgh grid on December 18, 1957. It was decommissioned in 1982.—RA