Atoms Work for Peace at Shippingport

...But its main hall resembles an indoor swimming pool after closing time...

...After President Eisenhower announced his "atoms for peace" program in 1953, it took five years to prove that America could translate the idea into a working reality...

...Although little noticed, the world's greatest atomic power station—and the first exclusively devoted to peaceful use—has opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, a hamlet 25 miles outside Pittsburgh...

...The "core" from which it was generated consisted of 14 tons of uranium and 165 pounds of enriched uranium carefully encased in an 8-foot steel cylinder...

...It was controlled —released or stopped at will within split seconds—by four young men in open sport shirts who calmly smoked their pipes while they watched mysterious wallboards in their subterranean, water-surrounded, concrete-covered room...

...Yet there is little doubt that the Shippingport miracle will change the face of the earth, and that its ultimate effects will be felt in African deserts and Asian steppes...

...While it is split, its heat generates the steam which drives a conventional turbine, and through it the electric power...

...Since May 26, the homes, streets and factories of 144 communities along the busy banks of the Ohio River have been heated, lit and driven by atomic energy...

...Health and safety hazards were reduced until they ceased to exist...

...Deep down at its bottom and reaching almost to the surface, there is a tower which holds the small, powerful atomic core...

...Foreign experts who came to Shippingport to study the plant agreed that this country has given more to humanity by this achievement of peaceful atomic use than the world—and Americans themselves, too—now realizes...

...When the pioneer plant finally began to work, some people in the area with whom I talked were not even aware of the fact that their lights, electric clocks, washing machines and a thousand other things were being run by the power of the unfettered atom...

...A crew of 1,800, the brains of several hundred scientists, technicians and industrialists, and the dollars of the Atomic Energy Commission and of free enterprise—the Westinghouse and Duquesne Corporations in particular—joined to overcome the countless difficulties that arose while the plant was being built...

...Resembling sleepy students rather than modern magicians, they were the masters of the atomic furnace from which 60,000 kilowatts of electric power were continuously supplied...

...With one pound of uranium split by an atomic reactor, the power of 2.5 million pounds of coal is generated...

...And the world need no longer worry about running out of energy, now that the Shippingport plant has proved a success...

...Inside, this peacetime atomic-power station, with its spotlessly clean, smokeless and noiseless corridors and cubicles, looks like a small hospital...

...Global coal and oil reserves are expected to vanish in 60 or 70 years at the present rate of use...

...The blueprints for this peaceful atomic plant were based on designs which the U.S...

...Navy's nuclear genius, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, had drawn for atomic submarines...

...it is taken up almost entirely by a very deep "canal" filled with crystal-clear light blue water...

...Future generations may well remember its opening date, rather than the first days of Sputnik, as the beginning of a new era...

...I watched the historic moment when the atom was "burned" for the first time at Shippingport to produce a flameless fire sufficient to satisfy all the needs of a community of 250,000...

...but the available uranium reserves will last for the next 1,500 years, even in the unlikely case of no further progress...

...For now electricity can be supplied to backward nations stymied by the lack of such energy-giving raw materials as coal, oil and gas...