By Willis L. Shirk Jr.
This article originally appeared in Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine:
"In December 1953, President Eisenhower delivered his "Atoms for Peace" address before the United Nations, calling for the world's nuclear powers to stockpile uranium to be used for peaceful purposes and for the creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency to administer the program. In order for America's civilian reactor program to succeed, AEC needed to find a willing private partner to share the costs and to demonstrate the commercial viability of the project. Several companies submitted bids, but it was Philip A. Fleger, chairman and president of Duquesne Light Company, who aggressively committed his firm to winning the bid. Despite the fact that low fuel prices and plentiful supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil in Pennsylvania meant that nuclear power did not then make economic sense, Fleger and Duquesne nonetheless agreed to commit $30 million toward the project over five years in order to advance the technology for the future.Want less carbon pollution? Build more nuclear reactors.
Fleger envisioned eventually replacing coal-powered plants with clean nuclear power generation to eliminate the pall of industrial soot, smoke, and acid rain that had plagued Pittsburgh for more than a century. In exchange for Duquesne's commitment, AEC financed 90 percent of the cost of the facility, built the reactor, and assumed all legal liability for any problems that developed. On Labor Day in 1954, President Eisenhower waved a ceremonial neutron wand over a neutron counter in Denver, Colorado, that signaled a bulldozer twelve hundred miles away in Shippingport to begin construction of the nation's first commercial nuclear power plant.
Although AEC intended Shippingport to become operational by 1957, Great Britain's Calder Hall Pressurized Pile Producing Power and Plutonium Plant at Seascale, Cumbria, went online on August 27, 1956, more than a year before Shippingport, earning the honor of being the world's first large-scale commercial nuclear power plant. Meanwhile, Rickover and the Naval Reactors Branch directed all aspects of the design of the pressurized light water plant at Shippingport, and Westinghouse Electric served as the general contractor. Dravo Corporation won the contract to construct and install the reactor, and Duquesne Light chose the firm of Burns and Roe to construct the turbine generator.
Shippingport went critical on December 2, 1957, and began producing its first power at 12:30 a.m. on December 18. It reached full power at sixty-eight megawatts five days later. As a combination power plant and research reactor, Shippingport would eventually demonstrate proof of concept for commercial nuclear power in America. The next milestone occurred in 1964, when the plant was temporarily shut down to install a new reactor core that increased the electrical generating capacity to one hundred megawatts. The new core operated from February 3, 1965, to February 4, 1974, when it was shut down because of a mechanical failure in a turbine generator. DOE then converted the plant into a light water breeder reactor to test the feasibility of using naturally occurring thorium and the artificially created isotope uranium 233 to breed more fuel than was consumed by the plant while generating electricity."
