50 Years Of Nuclear Energy1

50 Years of Nuclear Energy1
1. “The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine.” Lord Ernest Rutherford, 1933. 2. “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes [nuclear generated] electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Lewis Strauss, Chairman,US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954. 3. In 2004, half a century after electricity produced by nuclear power was first delivered to an electrical grid at Obninsk in today’s Russian Federation, we know the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. 4. Nuclear fission was discovered in 1939, and the world’s first chain reaction was achieved by the Manhattan Project on 2 December 1942 at the Universityof Chicago. The Chicago nuclear pile consisted of uranium embedded in bricklike blocks of graphite to serve as the moderator. However, it was not until after the war, on 20 December 1951, that electricity was first generated from nuclear power. The source was EBR-I (Experimental Breeder Reactor-I), a fast breeder reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, USA. EBR-I initiallyproduced about 100 kW(e), enough to power the equipment in the small reactor building.

A. International developments
5. In the 1950s nuclear power research and development focused mainly on technologies for civilian electricity generation and naval propulsion, particularly submarines. The emphasis in the USA was on light water reactor (LWR) designs fueled with enriched uranium, both the pressurizedwater reactor (PWR) associated principally with Westinghouse and the boiling water reactor (BWR) associated with General Electric (GE). Development in the USSR covered both graphite moderated, light water cooled, enriched uranium designs and WWER designs (water cooled water moderated power reactor) similar to PWRs. British and French efforts focused on natural uranium fueled, graphite moderated,gas cooled reactors (GCR).2 Canada focused on natural uranium fueled, heavy water moderated designs. 6. Initial success, both for civilian power generation and submarine propulsion, came in 1954. On 9 May 1954 the 5 MW(e) graphite moderated, light water cooled, enriched uranium reactor at Obninsk, USSR reached criticality, and at 5:30 pm on 26 June 1954 it was connected to the Mosenergo grid. InDecember 1954, the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus in the USA, began operation under nuclear power. 7. In 1956 Calder Hall-1, a 50 MW(e) GCR, came on line in the UK (and operated until March 2003). Shippingport in the USA was next, a 60 MW(e) PWR connected to the grid in 1957, followed in 1959 by G-2 (Marcoule) a 38 MW(e) GCR in France. Also in 1959, the world’s first nonmilitary nuclearpowered ship, the icebreaker Lenin, was launched in the USSR. Figure 1 presents a ____________________________________________________________

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1

This summary borrows heavily, frequently verbatim, from David Fischer’s History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: the first forty years, IAEA, Vienna, Austria, 1997.
2

World Nuclear Association(http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf54.htm).

03 History

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timeline showing these dates, the dates when nuclear power first came on line in other countries around the world, and, in the middle of the bar, the dates when total installed nuclear capacity worldwide reached 100 GW(e), 200 GW(e), and 300 GW(e). At the end of 2003, it stood at 361 GW(e). 8. An important contributor to the initial spread of nuclearpower was a new post-war international openness and exchange, triggered most substantially by a United Nations conference in 1955 that came to be known as “The First Geneva Conference”. It proved to be the world’s largest gathering of scientists and engineers up to that time, and both confirmed for a broad audience that numerous uses of nuclear energy were now feasible, and lifted the blanket of...