EBR-One: The Light That Changed Everything
Idaho
About eighteen miles southeast of Arco in the high desert of eastern Idaho, a squat concrete building sits in the sagebrush near nothing in particular. Inside is the machine that, on the twentieth of December, nineteen fifty-one, lit four light bulbs and changed the history of energy on earth.
The Experimental Breeder Reactor One, known as EBR-One, was designed at Argonne National Laboratory and built at what is now the Idaho National Laboratory, then called the National Reactor Testing Station. It was the first reactor constructed at the site, which became the most concentrated collection of experimental nuclear reactors in the world during the Cold War decades.
The afternoon of December twentieth was the moment the reactor's operators had worked toward. At one fifty in the afternoon, EBR-One produced enough electricity to illuminate four two-hundred-watt bulbs. The next day it was generating enough to power the entire building. It was the first time in human history that usable electricity had been generated by nuclear means.
But EBR-One did something else that the team considered even more significant: it was a breeder reactor. It produced more nuclear fuel than it consumed while generating electricity, creating plutonium from the uranium it burned. This was the proof of a theoretical concept, and it pointed toward a future in which nuclear power might be genuinely self-sustaining.
In the summer of nineteen fifty-five, a nearby experimental reactor called BORAX-Three was connected to the town of Arco, making Arco the first municipality in the world to be powered entirely by nuclear electricity, an event that lasted about one hour before conventional power resumed.
EBR-One was decommissioned in nineteen sixty-four and declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-five. It is open to visitors in the summer months, the original reactor core intact, the control room preserved exactly as it appeared on the afternoon four light bulbs came on and the atomic age became something more than a bomb.
