U. grad recalls early days of nuclear energy in Idaho


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ARCO, Idaho — Look across southern Idaho's desert near Arco and you'll see scrub oak, ancient volcano formations and not much else. About 20 miles east of Arco stands a fairly ordinary-looking building. But inside, it houses an extraordinary monument to the early days of nuclear energy.

“Experimental Breeder Reactor One was the first reactor built at the Idaho site, the first in the world to make a usable amount of electricity,” said Don Miley of the Idaho National Laboratory.

The Argonne National Laboratory built EBR-1 on ground used by the U.S. Navy during World War II to test-fire its big guns. Its purpose was to test the notion that nuclear energy could be generated around the clock, could be controlled and done safely.

Making history

By December 1951, EBR-1 made history by lighting four 200-watt light bulbs. It was the first time a nuclear reactor had generated electrical power.

“You can run a lot more than four light bulbs off a 250 kVa generator,” said Ray Haroldsen, who began working at the facility within two weeks of the experiment.

“They couldn’t make the generator work, there was a mistake made in the control panel,” Haroldsen explained. “They needed an electrical engineer to find out what the problem was.”

In 1951, Haroldsen had just graduated from the University of Utah’s electrical engineering program. A native of Idaho Falls, Idaho, Haroldsen had returned home and interviewed for several jobs.

“I even spent a little time out here working as a blueprint checker before they found me,” said Haroldsen.

Once Argonne hired Haroldsen, he went straight to work.

“A week later, we had enough power not only to run this building but much more,” he recalled. “It was a quirk of faith. I found myself one of the residual members of the Enrico Fermi team out here.”

First nuclear chain reaction

Ten years earlier, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi had created the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago.

“His right-hand man, Walter Zinn, became my boss,” said Haroldsen. “I associated with him and that’s where I got a lot of my knowledge.”

But for years, the U.S. government kept much of what was going on at EBR-1 under wraps.

“Folks knew something was happening out here,” said Miley. “They knew it was nuclear, that it was non-weapons. But I don’t know if a lot of people paid close attention.”

“My kids never knew what I did out here,” Haroldsen said. “I think my wife knew quite a bit about it.”

By 1953, EBR-1 reached another significant milestone when it proved a reactor could create more fuel than it uses.

“You don’t have to have an infinite supply of uranium to keep it going,” said Haroldsen.

At the time, the thought was nuclear power would have a huge advantage over coal-fired plants that would eventually run out of coal.

“It’s not the way things turned out,” Haroldsen said. “We don’t have any shortage of uranium at the moment — how come? It’s because we’re using the stockpile of old bombs to run reactors. You can dilute way down from a 99 percent enriched bomb down to a 7 percent (for a reactor), so it extends (fuel supply) dramatically."

Accidental meltdown

The next milestone reached by EBR-1 was just as significant, if not a little frightening. During a shutdown test in November 1955, it suffered America’s first accidental meltdown.

“It was a higher risk experiment,” said Haroldsen. The experiment involved pushing the uranium fuel to an extreme temperature above 850 degrees. “We knew it. We were going to shut the reactor down and walk away from it anyway. It hardly didn’t matter, we thought.”

Haroldsen said within just minutes, the reactor power went off scale suddenly and then came back down.

“There was no noise, no explosion — what had happened? We weren’t sure. Until a few minutes later when a radiation monitor signaled there was radiation coming out of the reactor," he said.

It just took seconds for half of the reactor’s radioactive core to meltdown. No one was hurt, and the accident could not be detected outside the building.

“So the reactor down there was only about as big as a football,” said Haroldsen. “The active part of it. When you look in the drawings, it looks as big as any other reactor, but it’s not.”

A rebuild of EBR-1's reactor started months later. The team wanted to learn from the exact science behind the meltdown. It would be another year before the public learned of it.

By then, other reactors were coming online at the site, including BORAX, the reactor that powered the entire town of Arco, Idaho — another nuclear first.

“I was the one that closed the switch and lit Arco,” Haroldsen recalled.

Part of American history

The final shutdown of EBR-1 came in December 1963. Three years later, President Lyndon Johnson designated the reactor a national landmark for its breakthroughs in nuclear energy technology.

That designation has preserved much of the facility. Every summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, EBR-1 is open to the public, free of charge.

“This is a huge part of American history,” said Miley. “And the Department of Energy has been very smartly recognizing the need to let people see this.”

Despite some of the risks of early days of the nuclear industry, Haroldsen — who is 88 years old — said most of the people he worked with lived to see old age.

"I’ve been subjected to very high radiation levels, and I’m still here,” he said.

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