Visit a Nuke! Wear your best!

Here are a few postcards from visitors centers promoting nuclear power. Don't you love the fashions?

This is a scene from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago at the Commonweath Edison exhibit with a model of the Dresden Power Station Unit 1. Our ladies, with legs coyly forward, are learning how electricity produced by nuclear reactors serves American homes and industries.

Dad and sons are figuring out their tour at Quad Cities, another Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) plant. What big feet these guys have!

Finally, here's the visitors' center at the Brunswick Plant in Southport, NC, south of Wilmington. Do you think the shoes on the family in the lower right hand corner could be any whiter?!? For me this plant is memorable because I was hit by a car in a convenience store parking lot in Southport while on a plant visit for NRC in 1983.  Not serious - I live to tell the tale!

Fermi achieves chain reaction 70 years ago.

On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi obtained the first chain reaction controlled fission in Chicago Pile-1 underneath Stagg Field in Chicago. 

The cards show the 94 MWe prototype fast breeder reactor near Detroit named for Fermi, who died in 1954. Fermi Unit 1 started construction in 1957, achieved criticality in 1963, and went into "high power" ascension in December 1965.

 On October 5, 1966 Fermi 1 suffered a partial fuel meltdown. According to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there was no abnormal radiation release to the environment.  Nearly four years later, Fermi 1 was restarted.  In November 1972, the Power Reactor Development Company made the decision to decommission Fermi 1. Fermi Unit 2, a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor  received an operating license in 1985. Fermi Unit 3, an ESBWR, is under consideration.

The Atomium at Expo 1958: Nuclear Optimism

This card depicts the "Atomium", the symbol of Expo 58, the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, the first such fair since World War II.  As described on the Atomium's website,  the structure "symbolised the democratic will to maintain peace among all the nations, faith in progress, both technical and scientific and, finally, an optimistic vision of the future of a modern, new, super-technological world for a better life for mankind. The peaceful use of atomic energy for scientific purposes embodied these themes particularly well and, so, that is what determined the shape of the edifice." The structure is 102 metres high and represents an elementary iron crystal. Engineer André Waterkeyn and architects André and Jean Polak contributed to the design. Although intended to be disassembled after the fair, the Atomium has survived and been refurbished, much like other exposition icons like the Eiffel Tower and the Unisphere from the 1964-65 New York World's Fair.

Among the national and industrial exhibits at the fair (I love that there were pavilions for chocolate - after all this is Belgium -- and tobacco), Westinghouse had an exhibition which included a model reactor, depicted on this card. On the reverse the card states that the reactor will be completed between 1960 and 1962, and will be used at the Yankee plant in the U.S. (Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts) and the SELNI plant in Italy.

Got a light?

Here are a couple matchbooks put out by Consumers Power Company to promote their two nuclear plants: the early Big Rock Point plant, a small 67 MWe General Electric Boiling Water Reactor in northern Michigan that operated from 1962 -1997, and the still operating Palisades Nuclear Plant, a 778 MWe plant of Combustion Engineering design, in South Haven Michigan. Palisades received its operating license in 1971 and a renewed license in 2007 for 20 additional years of operation beyond the original license term.

During my first years at the NRC I worked on what was then the largest civil penalty case brought against an operator -- a $450,000 fine (penalties in 1980 were allowed up to $5000 per day per violation) against Consumers Power for not properly isolating a line after a maintenance operation which could thereby compromise containment integrity in case of an accident, a condition not discovered for over a year. Compare that to the $155, 000 penalty assessed on the operator of Three Mile Island 2 after the 1979 accident! The case was settled for half the proposed penalty.

 And here's another gem -- a cigarette lighter from Northern States Power in Minnesota.  This probably depicts the Monticello Plant, the first reactor built by NSP (now under Xcel Energy), though the artist's depiction doesn't quite match what you find you see in modern photographs.

Let's light up with nukes!

Nuclear Power - No thanks?

A popular anti-nuke symbol became a picture of a smiling sun with a simple message - Nuclear Power? No thanks! The symbol supposedly originated in Denmark in the mid-1970s. The simple button was reproduced in any number of languages. Here's a postcard in Italian --

 And a more graphic sheet of stickers from Germany --

Arco, Idaho - First city lit by nuclear energy

Arco, Idaho, takes credit as being the first city lit by nuclear generated electricity. Near the town was the site of the National Reactor Testing Station, established in 1949 by the Atomic Energy Commission, and now the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.  The lab conducted many early experiments with reactor designs, including the BORAX experiments on early boiling water reactor technology. On July 17, 1955, one of the BORAX reactors (III) was used to provide electricity to Arco, the first reactor in the world to power a city.  

One of the BORAX reactors was a forerunner to the SL-1 reactor at the lab, an experimental US Army reactor that experienced a steam explosion and meltdown in 1961 which killed three persons in an event that raised speculation about possible murder/suicide linked to the accident.

This other card from Arco seems to have added its nuclear history as an afterthought. 

It's mostly about portraying Native Americans - in a rather politically incorrect way by today's standards!

The LaCrosse Six Pack

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!

Atomic Hollywood

This is one of my favorite cards - an oversized view of the General Atomics facility near San Diego, California, made much more interesting by the note written on the back recounting a celebrity party attended by the writer, an AEC employee in the late 1950s.  General Atomic was then a division of General Dynamics and the developer of the Triga reactor.  The picture is of the John Jay Hopkins laboratory.

The card's reverse has a note sent to Jo Sobel in D.C. from "Jeannine", both apparently AEC employees in 1957 when the card is postmarked.  Jeannine recounts some off the job adventures, including a visit to the local track in Del Mar and going to a party at the Turf Club.  She writes, "Never did I think that I would be rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood crowd, such as Victor Mature, Jimmy Durante, Betty Grable & Harry James (they had a horse running in the sixth) Lucy Ball & Desi Arnaz, Hoagy Carmichael & Arthur Godfrey who happened to be in town." Jeannine also notes the move of the AEC to Germantown, Maryland, where the Department of Energy (successor to the promotional side of the AEC) still has facilities.

I picked up this card off eBay from a woman who was apologetic for its condition, but I've never seen it elsewhere.  For a number of years, the NRC worked to get the spent fuel from the facility moved to storage with DOE, something we were able to finally accomplish in 2010.

Election Day

OK, folks, I'm breaking from the nuclear energy theme and urging you all to get out there and vote tomorrow if you haven't already.

I picked up this card at an event for Americans in Paris a few weeks ago. I dropped our ballots in the mail Friday during a brief return to the States to visit family in Massachusetts. I return to Paris Tuesday evening and probably won't know the results til I get off the plane at DeGaulle Wednesday morning.

Pilgrim Plant on Cape Cod Bay

I am back in the states for a few days visiting family in the Boston area. They live just outside the Emergency Planning Zone near the Pilgrim Plant, a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor operating since 1972 and now the only operating nuclear plant in Massachusetts.  Originally operated by Boston Edison Co., the plant is now owned and operated by Louisiana-based Entergy Corp. The operating license was renewed earlier in 2012 after resolution of a number of challenges. Pilgrim had its ups and downs in the 1980s when equipment and management problems resulted in a prolonged plant shutdown. FEMA also identified emergency planning deficiencies that had to be addressed at a time when Governor Dukakis' administration was actively fighting the licensing of the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire on emergency planning grounds and seemed to follow a policy of benign neglect at Pilgrim.

We used to take the kids up to Massachusetts for summer holidays and walked Green Harbor and Duxbury Beaches and could see the plant across Plymouth Harbor in the distance.

A number of local citizens and advocacy groups were active in the restart proceedings in the late 1980s when I worked for Commissioner and then Chairman Carr. Carr appeared at a congressional field hearing in Plymouth after an inspector general report criticized the NRC staff's handling of some restart issues. Perhaps demonstrating best that there is room for mutual respect across varying viewpoints on nuclear energy, one of the local activists to this day sends Admiral Carr flowers on his birthday. 

Do you know where your nukes are?

Here's a varied set of cards that draw attention to where nuclear facilities are - or will be -- located.  Some seem to favor the benefits of nuclear energy, others are intended to jolt you into awareness of that nuke in your backyard.  The first is a 1960's US card pointing out planned nuclear plants:  note the quote on the back: "Atomic power has youth, glamor and substance." Wow!

Others want to remind you that there are nukes in your neighborhood. What's that doing for you? Are you worried? Should you be?

This one was put out by the Anti-Nuclear Campaign headquartered in Sheffield, England,  and suggests "You don't have to be an expert to know what's wrong with nuclear power."

Even in heavily nuclear France, some cards seem to want you to question the prevailing nuclear norm:

And this one from 1984  invites you to explore the nuclear Rhone Valley:

As the reverse says, the Rhone Valley has the largest nuclear concentration in the world!

Finally we have this late 1980s card from Sweden which I originally thought was a protest card, but based on a crude translation, seems to be saying, "What are you worried about"?

As best I can tell, the reverse of the card quotes a Swedish government report that says electrical demand is growing and suggests that the Chernobyl accident doesn't give rise to a rejection of nuclear power.

It leaves us with the question: will Sweden really be safer without nuclear power? I guess we're supposed to look at all those other nuke spots on the map of Europe and not feel so bad about living in Sweden!

Cheese or Nukes?

The French are building a new plant at Flamanville on the Normandy coast at a site with two currently operating reactors. The Areva-designed EPR is also being built at the Olkiluito site in Finland and potentially in the US, though the planned new  unit at  Calvert Cliffs has stumbled due to a provision in the US Atomic Energy Act prohibiting foreign ownership or control of a power plant licensee. Here's an EDF promotional post card of the Flamanville 3 plant under construction:

Although France produces nearly 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, President Hollande has proposed reducing that proportion to 50% by 2025. Hollande calls for closing the older Fessenheim units, while continuing the construction of Flamanville 3.  There are some signs of protest, like this playful card that my daughter spotted in a souvenir shop at Mont Saint Michel during our visit  in 2011:

You can see the play on words - so what will it be? La tome de Savoie or l'atome de Normandie?
Cheese or nukes?

Atomic Towns

Here are classic "linen" post cards of the 1950's extolling three towns' atomic connections. The first is Oak Ridge, Tennessee, "Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb," as the back of the card reminds us. Oak Ridge was the "secret city" as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb and remains one of the national labs.

Paducah was the site of a new uranium enrichment plant built for the Atomic Energy Commission that began operation in 1952. The plant was originally operated for the AEC by Union Carbide and eventually was operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation, though the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), eventual successor to the AEC, owns it. The Paducah plant's life has been extended another year.

The Portsmouth Uranium Enrichment Plant is actually in Piketon, Ohio, near Portsmouth. It operated originally from 1952 until the mid-1960s to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and then turned to processing for commercial fuel for nuclear power plants. It ceased operation in 2001.

Artistic Protest

These are two cards supporting anti-nuclear causes using the work of Austrian artist-architect-environmentalist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I first came across Hundertwasser when I was a student in Vienna in 1974, the year of a major retrospective of his work at the Albertina Museum. His philosophy can probably be summed up in this quote: "Paradise is there, but we destroy it."

The first card shows a poster donated by Hundertwasser to Ralph Nader's Critical Mass Energy Project in Washington in 1980.

The poster itself is based on a silkscreen created by Hundertwasser about a decade earlier: Irinaland over the Balkans with Bulgarian actress Irina Maleeva as the subject. Hundertwasser visited Washington in 1980 and in his honor Mayor Marion Barry, Jr., proclaimed  "Hundertwasser Day" which was marked by planting of the first 12 of 100 trees in Judiciary Square.

The poster was also used in other anti-nuclear campaigns, with sales proceeds going to the citizen action groups. The version below was for the benefit of the Initiative östereichische Atomkraftwerkgegner (Initiative of Austrian Opponents of Atomic Power Plants):

The post card's legend translates as "Atomic Final Solution - No, No, No, No."

Hundertwasser died in 2000 at age 72 while on the Queen Elizabeth 2.

Atomic Jobs - Binders of Men!

Well, maybe the Romney allusion is a stretch, but I did find amusing this 1950's era post card for DeVry Technical Institute in Chicago picturing its training labs to prepare its students for careers using, among other things, "nuclear instrumentation." 

The legend on the back says it all: DeVry is "one of the best-known, best-equipped training organizations of its kind in the nation for preparing and helping men get started in Television-Radio- Electronics." I guess they never heard of Women in Nuclear.

One of the students apparently sent the card to his sweetie.

The other card is a small trading card (about 1 x 2 1/2 inches) issued in the 1960s by a British soft drink company in a series on "Adventurous Lives" -- of men, that is. This one features an "atomic worker":

I'm sure he was ready for a lubbly Jubbly  after a hard day at the glovebox!

Ontario's Bruce Power Units return to service

Two units at the Bruce Power Station in Ontario, Canada, have recently returned to service after a 17 year hiatus. At the time of lay-up in the mid 1990s Ontario Hydro, then the operating company, was facing the consequences of a poor performance and reliability. A number of U.S. advisors and managers, many of whom had helped U.S. plants break out of a similar malaise, were brought in for the recovery. 

In 1997 when I was an Associate General Counsel at the US NRC, I was contacted by Ontario Hydro and subsequently was offered a position as a legal advisor. It was a hard decision whether to take the offer and move to Toronto, and I jokingly said to my wife that I would make the decision based on the outcome of a Toronto Blue Jays - Baltimore Orioles baseball game that I was watching at about the point I had to make a decision. The Orioles won 3-2 in the 9th inning.  I stayed in Maryland for another 15 years with the US NRC.

Indian Point: Optimism and Anxiety

It's like deja vu all over again, as Yogi said.  A New York governor named Cuomo opposes the licensing of a reactor in his own state. Some 25 years ago it was Mario and Shoreham. Now it's Andrew and Indian Point.  NRC hearings on the application for renewal of Units 2 and 3 recently began.

I've picked diverse pieces of memorabilia: one that reflects the optimism of the early years of atomic power; the others reflect the anxiety bred by calls to shut down the plant due to its proximity to New York City and supposed attractiveness as a target for terrorists.

The Con Edison brochure from c. 1960 illustrates the benefits of electricity generated from the proposed Indian Point Unit 1 to New York City. There's a certain irony in the proximity of the plant to the city in the cover illustration, given later opposition to the plant based on that fact.  Unit 1 itself was shut down by the mid-1970s because it did not have an Emergency Core Cooling System required of all plants as a result of an AEC rulemaking.  In response to a Union of Concerned Scientists petition, the NRC held a special proceeding in the early 1980s on the risk of operation of Units 2 and 3 in light of the population density near the site.

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 in New York and Washington recharged arguments against the plant as illustrated in these advocacy post cards calling the plant a nuclear weapon. Each is intended to be sent to some public official -- or in one case his wife.  The back of one card is addressed to Mrs. Diaz, the wife of then NRC Chairman Nils Diaz, who served as Commissioner from 1996 to 2003 and then as Chairman until mid 2006.