![]() Haroldsen’s boss yelled to the technician to shut the reactor down. In this video, Haroldsen, in the EBR-I control room, explains exactly what happened next. The power produced by the reactor started rising and rapidly went off the scales. The experiment ended more quickly than they thought it would. They knew there was a risk the core could be destroyed, but they planned to proceed slowly and back off at the first sign of danger. They decided to turn the coolant off while slowly turning the power up, in the hopes of determining what made the reactor act the way it did. Since the reactor was nearing the end of its useful life, the scientists decided to conduct an experiment that was riskier than they’d normally have tolerated. EBR-I, for example, used uranium as a fuel source, which created an isotope of plutonium, another fissile material, as a byproduct. By 1955, the reactor had done everything it had been designed to do, but there was one more mystery the EBR-I team wanted to solve, a quirk of the reactor’s behavior: It didn’t respond to changes in coolant flow in the most stable way. In addition to demonstrating that nuclear could be a viable energy source, scientists there wanted to show they could create a “breeder reactor,” or a highly efficient reactor that, in theory, creates more fissile material-the nuclear fuel that undergoes fission to create energy-than it consumes. EBR-I made history by making enough nuclear energy to power light bulbs. It was the first peaceful use of atomic energy-the first example of nuclear power that could be used to light a house or a city. But when the press caught wind of the core’s unplanned meltdown, the reactor would become the focus of intense scrutiny and described as an “out of control” experiment, and one of the first accidents associated with nuclear power. The next day, the reactor was powering an entire building. On December 20, 1951, the experimental plant created enough power to light four bulbs, 200 watts apiece. Before EBR-I started up, nuclear reactions had been used to produce only tiny amounts of electricity. The federal government built EBR-I, as the reactor was called, in the desert of Idaho, not far from the city of Arco, as a proof-of-concept for intriguing ideas about nuclear power. Engineer Ray Haroldsen was working in his office “a short distance from the control room,” as he later wrote, and didn’t know there had been a meltdown until a technician came by to tell him. When the core of the Experimental Breeder Reactor No. ![]()
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