68 years ago on December 20th, 1951, these lights were lit:
The story? From Nuclear Power.net
History of Nuclear power plants
Electricity was generated by a nuclear reactor for the first time ever on September 3, 1948 at the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the United States, and was the first nuclear power plant to power a light bulb. The second, larger experiment occurred on December 20, 1951 at the EBR-I experimental station near Arco, Idaho in the United States. On June 27, 1954, the world’s first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid started operations at the Soviet city of Obninsk.The world’s first full scale power station, Calder Hall in England opened on October 17, 1956. The first full scale power station with a PWR-type reactor was a Shippingport Atomic Power Station, commisioned on May 26, 1958.
The electricity generated by the X-10 reactor was generated by thermoelectricity - a thermocouple. A few watts at best and not enough to light a lightbulb let alone four 200 watt units. The Russian reactor was an open graphite core design which evolved into the RBMK design famous for the Chernobyl disaster.
I was only eight years old at the time but I remember Shippingport being a Very Big Deal - I toured the plant a few years later with a school group.
The very first reactor? That would be Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile - from the University of Chicago:
How the first chain reaction changed science
The Atomic Age began at 3:25 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1942—quietly, in secrecy, on a squash court under the west stands of old Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.
Today, Henry Moore’s “Nuclear Energy” sculpture and the Mansueto Library occupy the area at the corner of Ellis Avenue and 57th Street where Enrico Fermi and his colleagues engineered the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction 70 years ago. Their experiment was a key step in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb during World War II.
That initial chain reaction was too weak to power even a single light bulb. It nevertheless transformed the world, and the University of Chicago along with it, in a range of endeavors spanning physics, chemistry, interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and nuclear medicine. Even in 1942, those present at the historic event sensed how influential their work would be.
There is some exciting research being done with new designs for commercial power. We know how to do it, we know how to process the waste materials and to render them harmless ( recycle them into new fuel and inert waste) but thanks to President Jimmy Carter, we are not allowed to so this. Still, we are heading in the right direction.
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