I'm featuring two cards today from La Crosse, Wisconsin, home of one of the early AEC turnkey projects and the home of the world's largest six pack. The La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor (LACBWR) was an early demonstration project built by Allis-Chalmers and ultimately licensed to Dairyland Power Cooperative. It was a small 50 Mw plant (also known as the Genoa #2 plant) that began operation and ultimately shut down in 1987. The card shows the LACBWR with its dome in the center and a coal fired plant to its left.
The card above shows the reactor along the Mississippi River in the beautiful Coulee region of Wisconsin. I spent time in La Crosse in the early 1980s representing the NRC in an enforcement hearing related to the capability of the plant to withstand seismic events, particularly soil liquefaction in the event of an earthquake larger than the plant's original design basis. So what's that have to do with a six pack?
La Crosse was a great beer -- and bar -- town. G.Heileman, once a major brewer in the Midwest (I sipped a few Old Styles at a couple Cubs games), had a brewery in La Crosse which featured, as the back of this card says, the "World's Largest Six Pack". During a break in our preparations for the hearing, we visited the brewery, sampled some of the product, and from the top of the brewery building observed the reactor several miles south of town. We were happy to learn that the six pack (the krausening tanks for Old Style beer) pictured here would provide one person a six pack a day for 3,351 years! Heileman, like the La Crosse reactor, have passed away, though the six pack survives under a new operator, City Brewing, that has connections to the old Latrobe Brewery in Pennsylvania and to Boston Beer (Sam Adams). Cheers!
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