This Day in Scientific History (Ground Broken for 1st U.S. Nuclear Power Plant)

September 6, 1954—On Labor Day, a crowd witnessed President Dwight D. Eisenhower—in town recovering from a heart attack--waving a ceremonial neutron wand over a neutron counter in Denver, Colorado, sending a radio signal to another site 2,500 miles away in Shippingport, Pa. that construction could begin on what was expected to be the world’s first nuclear power plant.

Another plant in Great Britain beat the one near Pittsburgh to the punch, opening nearly a year before. But the life of the American plant—from its opening in 1957 to its decommissioning in 1989—illustrates how initial optimism about a new technology can often give way to disillusionment.

The Shippingport plant, begun 10 months after Eisenhower unveiled his “Atoms for Peace” program before the United Nations, inaugurated the American love affair with the nuclear power plant. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, thought that this facility—the nation’s first full-scale central station nuclear power plant--was not merely a “pioneer venture” but would even exceed in importance the first railroad to the West. He predicted a future in which energy would be “too cheap to meter.”

Dreams die hard.

A little more than 20 years later, as a high-school sophomore, I attended a school assembly in which a representative of the atomic power industry appeared to present a dog-and-pony show about the industry.

Though hardly a hotbed of radicalism, my school viewed the presentation with irony. The follow-up questions, though polite, were pointed about safety issues. And this was three years before Three Mile Island.

The 60,000-kilowatt Shippingport demonstration project was built jointly by Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Light Co., under the direction of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Naval Reactor Group. Philip Fleger, head of Duquesne, conceived of the project as a way to eliminate the coal and the pollutants that fouled the Pittsburgh air in those days.

According to an interview Fleger gave American Heritage nearly a quarter-century after the plant’s opening, the company needed an alternative to the coal mines it already owned because new urban development laws in Pittsburgh involved strict smoke controls. Opposition to a coal-fired plant they had planned for the Allegheny River forced them to look to something else.

Under Rickover’s typical ferocious prodding, the Shippingport plant opened in two and a half years, compared to the 12 to 14 years required from inception two decades later. Unfortunately, the project went considerably over its budget.

Two decades later, the Beaver County plant was converted to a light water breeder reactor. The plant achieved another first in 1989: the first successfully decommissioned nuclear power plant, involving decontamination technology and nuclear waste-handling techniques. Its nuclear remains were transported more than 8,000 miles across country, finishing its journey on a barge on the Columbia River to be buried on the Hanford Military Reservation in the state of Washington.