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.