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!