EBR-One: Where Nuclear Power Lit a Light Bulb

About fifty miles west of Idaho Falls, on a volcanic plain so remote the Atomic Energy Commission chose it precisely because an accident there would not easily kill a city, stands a small concrete building that changed the history of civilization. It is called Experimental Breeder Reactor One, and on December twentieth, nineteen fifty-one, it generated the first usable electricity ever produced by nuclear fission.

The reactor had been designed by physicist Walter Zinn and his team at the Argonne National Laboratory as a test of a radical idea: that a nuclear reactor could breed new fuel faster than it consumed old fuel by wrapping its core in a blanket of uranium-two thirty-eight, which neutrons would convert into plutonium. The breeding concept was the long-term ambition. The more immediate experiment, on that December evening, was simpler. An operator slowly withdrew the control rods. The reactor went critical. Steam drove a turbine. The turbine powered four two-hundred-watt light bulbs. The next day it powered the entire EBR-One building.

The significance was enormous. For the first time in history, a human-built machine had converted the energy locked inside an atomic nucleus into ordinary electric current flowing through ordinary wires to ordinary lights. The Atomic Energy Commission celebrated the achievement.

The Idaho National Laboratory that grew up around EBR-One eventually became the largest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world, hosting over fifty experimental reactors across its nine hundred square miles. Today EBR-One is a National Historic Landmark and a free public museum, where visitors can stand beside the reactor. The four original light bulbs are mounted on a display inside. They are small, ordinary, and astonishing.