ID -- EBR-1, the world's first nuclear power plant:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: I saw a sign for this on my way through Idaho. The place wasn't opened (the sign said it would open the day after I was there) but I was curious. This information is from their official web site at http://www.anl.gov/OPA/logos20-1/ebr1.htm:
On Dec. 20, 1951, a nuclear reactor produced useful electricity for the first time.
It was barely enough to power a simple string of four, 100-watt light bulbs, but the 16 scientists and engineers - all staff members of Argonne National Laboratory, which designed and built the reactor - recorded their historic achievement by chalking their names on the wall beside the generator.
The reactor was Experimental Breeder Reactor-I (EBR-I), housed in a small building that today still sits alone on a wind-swept plain in southeastern Idaho. EBR-I spawned a huge international industry that now plays a major role in meeting the world's energy needs.
Today, more than 100 nuclear power plants provide 20 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States. More than 435 reactors provide some 17 percent of the world's electricity, and about 65 more plants are under construction around the world.
During its 15-year career, EBR-1 was the site of many historical firsts, and retired Argonne scientist Kirby Whitham was an integral part of several of them.
On that raw December day in 1951, scientists and technicians readied for the first test of the power-generating system. "We got the reactor critical, which was a rather slow process," Whitham said. "Generating steam for the first time was a problem, because we hadn't done it before. Technicians were running everywhere, measuring temperatures and so on.
"It took quite a while to get the turbine up to speed, then we had to load the generator. The generator put out 440 volts, so we used four light bulbs wired in series." ...
EBR-I's primary experimental mission was to develop and test the concept of the breeder reactor -- a vision pursued by Enrico Fermi and his colleague, Walter Zinn, who was Argonne's first director and who led the team that built EBR-I. The idea behind the breeder is to maximize the useful energy that can be extracted from natural uranium. ...
EBR-I provided the first proof that breeding is possible: On June 4, 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced that EBR-I had become the world's first reactor to demonstrate the breeding of plutonium from uranium.
In 1962, EBR-I became the world's first reactor to produce electricity with a plutonium core. For the next year, the reactor provided valuable data on breeding in a plutonium-fueled reactor and helped to improve scientists' understanding of the behavior of plutonium in an operating reactor.
On Dec. 30, 1963, its scientific mission complete, EBR-I was officially shut down. ...
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.146.37.35 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] EBR_030525_06.JPG
|
[2] EBR_030525_07.JPG
|
- Wikipedia Description: Experimental Breeder Reactor I
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I) is a decommissioned research reactor and U.S. National Historic Landmark located in the desert about 18 miles (29 km) southeast of Arco, Idaho. At 1:50 pm on December 20, 1951, it became the world's first electricity-generating nuclear power plant when it produced sufficient electricity to illuminate four 200-watt light bulbs. It subsequently generated sufficient electricity to power its building, and continued to be used for experimental purposes until it was decommissioned in 1964.
History
As part of the National Reactor Testing Station (now known as the Idaho National Laboratory), EBR-I's construction started in late 1949. The reactor itself was designed by a team led by Walter Zinn at the Argonne National Laboratory. In its early stages, the reactor plant was referred to as Chicago Pile 4 (CP-4) and Zinn's Infernal Pile. Installation of the reactor at EBR-I took place in early 1951 (the first reactor in Idaho) and it began power operation on August 24, 1951. On December 20 of that year, atomic energy was successfully harvested for the first time. The following day, the reactor produced enough power to light the whole building. The power plant produced 200 kW of electricity out of 1.4 MW of heat generated by the reactor.
The design purpose of EBR-I was not to produce electricity but instead to validate nuclear physics theory which suggested that a breeder reactor should be possible. In 1953, experiments revealed the reactor was producing additional fuel during fission, thus confirming the hypothesis. However, on November 29, 1955, the reactor at EBR-I suffered a partial meltdown during a coolant flow test. The flow test was trying to determine the cause of unexpected reactor responses to changes in coolant flow. It was subsequently repaired for further experiments, which determined that thermal expansion of the fuel rods and the thick plates supporting the fuel rods was the cause of the unexpected reactor response.
Although EBR-I produced the first electricity available in-house, a nearby reactor plant called BORAX-III was connected to external loads, powering the nearby city of Arco, Idaho in 1955, the first time a city had been powered solely by nuclear power.
Besides generating the world's first electricity from atomic energy, EBR-I was also the world's first breeder reactor and the first to use plutonium fuel to generate electricity (see also the Clementine nuclear reactor). EBR-1's initial purpose was to prove Enrico Fermi's fuel breeding principle, a principle that showed a nuclear reactor producing more fuel atoms than consumed. Along with generating electricity, EBR-1 would also prove this principle.
Decommission and legacy
EBR-I was deactivated in 1964 and replaced with a new reactor, EBR-II. Landmark status for EBR-I was granted by President Lyndon Johnson and Glenn T. Seaborg on August 25, 1966.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and an IEEE Milestone in 2004.
The site has been open to the public since 1976, but is only open between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Also on display at the site are two prototype reactors from the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project of the 1950s.
There is also a separate facility called Experimental Breeder Reactor II.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].