Arco: The First Town Lit by Nuclear Power

On July seventeenth, nineteen fifty-five, a small Idaho town of twelve hundred people became the first community in the world to receive its entire electricity supply from a nuclear source. The reactor was called BORAX Three, an experimental boiling-water plant operated by Argonne National Laboratory at the National Reactor Testing Station about twenty miles out in the desert. For over an hour, Arco ran entirely on atomic power.

It was a publicity milestone as much as a technical one, but the point landed: the Atomic Age could light a kitchen. The Idaho National Laboratory that grew from that testing station still operates nearby, and Arco leans into its peculiar distinction. On Number Hill above town, each graduating class of the local high school paints its year in large numbers.