This is a history of nuclear power as realized through the first artificial fission of atoms that would lead to the Manhattan Project and, eventually, to using nuclear fission to generate electricity.
Origins
In 1932, physicists John Cockcroft, Ernest Walton, and Ernest Rutherford discovered that when lithium atoms were "split" by protons from a proton accelerator, immense amounts of energy were released in accordance with the principle of mass–energy equivalence. However, they and other nuclear physics pioneers Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein believed harnessing the power of the atom for practical purposes anytime in the near future was unlikely. The same year, Rutherford's doctoral student James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Experiments bombarding materials with neutrons led Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie to discover induced radioactivity in 1934, which allowed the creation of radium-like elements. Further work by Enrico Fermi in the 1930s focused on using slow neutrons to increase the effectiveness of induced radioactivity. Experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons led Fermi to believe he had created a new transuranic element, which was dubbed hesperium.
In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, along with Austrian physicist Lise Meitner and Meitner's nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, conducted experiments with the products of neutron-bombarded uranium, as a means of further investigating Fermi's claims. They determined that the relatively tiny neutron split the nucleus of the massive uranium atoms into two roughly equal pieces, contradicting Fermi. This was an extremely surprising result; all other forms of nuclear decay involved only small changes to the mass of the nucleus, whereas this process—dubbed "fission" as a reference to biology—involved a complete rupture of the nucleus. Numerous scientists, including Leó Szilárd, who was one of the first, recognized that if fission reactions released additional neutrons, a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction could result.https://web.archive.org/web/20160310165547/http://alexwellerstein.com/atomic_patents/ Once this was experimentally confirmed and announced by Frédéric Joliot-Curie in 1939, scientists in many countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union) petitioned their governments for support of nuclear fission research, just on the cusp of World War II, for the development of a nuclear weapon.
First nuclear reactors
In the United States, where Fermi and Szilárd had both emigrated, the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction led to the creation of the first man-made reactor, the research reactor known as Chicago Pile-1, which achieved criticality on 2 December 1942. The reactor's development was part of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create atomic bombs during World War II. It led to the building of larger single-purpose production reactors, such as the X-10 Pile, for the production of weapons-grade plutonium for use in the first nuclear weapons. The United States tested the first nuclear weapon in July 1945, the Trinity test, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taking place the following month.
In August 1945, the first widely distributed account of nuclear energy, the pocketbook The Atomic Age, was released. It discussed the peaceful future uses of nuclear energy and depicted a future where fossil fuels would go unused. Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, who later chaired the United States Atomic Energy Commission, is quoted as saying "there will be nuclear powered earth-to-moon shuttles, nuclear powered artificial hearts, plutonium heated swimming pools for SCUBA divers, and much more".
In the same month, with the end of the war, Seaborg and others would file hundreds of initially classified patents, most notably Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg's Patent #2,736,696, on a conceptual light water reactor (LWR) that would later become the United States' primary reactor for naval propulsion and later take up the greatest share of the commercial fission-electric landscape.Lecture by Eric P. Loewen, Ph.D. President American Nuclear Society The United Kingdom, Canada, and the USSR proceeded to research and develop nuclear energy over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in Europe was achieved on 25 December 1946 by the F-1 (from "First Physical Reactor"), a research reactor operated by the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, USSR.
Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on 20 December 1951, at the EBR-I experimental station near Arco, Idaho, which initially produced about 100 kW."Reactor Makes Electricity." Popular Mechanics, March 1952, p. 105. In 1953, American President Dwight Eisenhower gave his "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations, emphasizing the need to develop "peaceful" uses of nuclear power quickly. This was followed by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 which allowed rapid declassification of U.S. reactor technology and encouraged development by the private sector.
Early years
The first organization to develop nuclear power was the U.S. Navy, with the S1W reactor for the purpose of propelling submarines and aircraft carriers. The first nuclear-powered submarine, , was put to sea in January 1954. The S1W reactor was a Pressurized Water Reactor. This design was chosen because it was simpler, more compact, and easier to operate compared to alternative designs, thus more suitable to be used in submarines. This decision would result in the PWR being the reactor of choice also for power generation, thus having a lasting impact on the civilian electricity market in the years to come. The United States Navy Nuclear Propulsion design and operation community, under Rickover's style
On 27 June 1954, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant in the USSR became the world's first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, producing around 5 megawatts of electric power. The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall at Windscale, England was connected to the national power grid on 27 August 1956. In common with a number of other generation I reactors, the plant had the dual purpose of producing electricity and plutonium-239, the latter for the nascent nuclear weapons program in Britain.C.N. Hill, "An Atomic Empire: A Technical History of the Rise and Fall of the British Atomic Energy Programme" (World Scientific, 2013). It had an initial capacity of 50 MW per reactor (200 MW total), it was the first of a fleet of dual-purpose MAGNOX reactors.The Early Years of Nuclear Energy in Britain Aarush Selvan. Stanford course work 2018. C. N. Hill, An Atomic Empire: A Technical History of the Rise and Fall of the British Atomic Energy Programme, Fred Roberts, 60 Years of Nuclear History, Britain's Hidden Agenda
The U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program formally commenced in 1954. Under its management, the 2 megawatt SM-1, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was the first in the United States to supply electricity in an industrial capacity to the commercial grid (VEPCO), in April 1957. The first commercial nuclear station to become operational in the United States was the 60 MW Shippingport Reactor (Pennsylvania), in December 1957. Originating from a cancelled nuclear-powered aircraft carrier contract, the plant used a PWR reactor design.Nuclear Reactions: Science and Trans-Science, American Institute of Physics 1992. Weinberg Its early adoption, technological lock-in,Out of options A surprising culprit in the nuclear crisis and familiarity among retired naval personnel, established the PWR as the predominant civilian reactor design, that it still retains today in the United States.
In 1957 EURATOM was launched alongside the European Economic Community (the latter is now the European Union). The same year also saw the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The first major accident at a nuclear reactor occurred at the 3 MW SL-1, a U.S. Army experimental nuclear power reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station, Idaho National Laboratory. It was derived from the Borax Boiling water reactor (BWR) design and it first achieved operational criticality and connection to the grid in 1958. For reasons unknown, in 1961 a technician removed a control rod about 22 inches farther than the prescribed 4 inches. This resulted in a steam explosion which killed the three crew members and caused a meltdown.IDO-19313: Additional Analysis of the SL-1 Excursion Final Report of Progress July through October 1962, 21 November 1962, Flight Propulsion Laboratory Department, General Electric Company, Idaho Falls, Idaho, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information. The event was eventually rated at 4 on the seven-level INES scale. On 16 September 1967, the Pathfinder Nuclear Station near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, open for about a year, suffered an accident which caused the one year old plant to be retired permanently when an operator opened a valve too fast. Another serious accident happened in 1968, when one of the two liquid-metal-cooled reactors on board the underwent a fuel element failure, with the emission of gaseous fission products into the surrounding air. This resulted in 9 crew fatalities and 83 injuries.
Development and early opposition to nuclear power
The total global installed nuclear capacity initially rose relatively quickly, rising from less than 1 gigawatt (GW) in 1960 to 100 GW in the late 1970s, and 300 GW in the late 1980s. Since the late 1980s worldwide capacity has risen much more slowly, reaching 366 GW in 2005. Between around 1970 and 1990, more than 50 GW of capacity was under construction (peaking at over 150 GW in the late 1970s and early 1980s)—in 2005, around 25 GW of new capacity was planned. More than two-thirds of all nuclear plants ordered after January 1970 were eventually cancelled. A total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States between 1975 and 1980.The Changing Structure of the Electric Power Industry p. 110.
In 1972 Alvin Weinberg, co-inventor of the light water reactor design (the most common nuclear reactors today) was fired from his job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the Nixon administration, "at least in part" over his raising of concerns about the safety and wisdom of ever larger scaling-up of his design, especially above a power rating of ~500 MWe, as in a loss of coolant accident scenario, the decay heat generated from such large compact solid-fuel cores was thought to be beyond the capabilities of passive/natural convection cooling to prevent a rapid fuel rod melt-down and resulting in then, potential far reaching fission product pluming. While considering the LWR, well suited at sea for the submarine and naval fleet, Weinberg did not show complete support for its use by utilities on land at the power output that they were interested in for supply scale reasons, and would request for a greater share of AEC research funding to evolve his team's demonstrated, Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, a design with greater inherent safety in this scenario and with that an envisioned greater economic growth potential in the market of large-scale civilian electricity generation.
Similar to the earlier BORAX reactor safety experiments, conducted by Argonne National Laboratory,Argonne’s Nuclear Science and Technology Legacy Multimedia Resources, Borax – Safety experiment on a boiling water reactor in 1976 Idaho National Laboratory began a test program focused on LWR reactors under various accident scenarios, with the aim of understanding the event progression and mitigating steps necessary to respond to a failure of one or more of the disparate systems, with much of the redundant back-up safety equipment and nuclear regulations drawing from these series of destructive testing investigations.