Yankee: Atom’s First Born
(Nov. 10-14 , 1980)
This series explored the Yankee Atomic plant as it turned 20 years old. The Rowe plant, with its “Taj Mahal” containment vessel tucked away in the hills, dated from a different era, and had a quiet charm and a congenial superintendent, belying the controversy that nuclear power had become. Over the dozen years that followed, the controversies would swallow up the plant, forcing its shutdown.
(First in a series)
ROWE — It was the dawn of the atomic age, and the mood reflected It:
“COUNTY SEES CHANCE OF GETTING FIRST N.E. ATOMIC PLANTS The Recorder-Gazette trumpeted on a front page in March 1955.
“Franklin County takes its place in the atomic age,” said an editorial, “whether we like it or not.
Location of an atomic power plant in Rowe will change the face of this county. No longer will this be a comparatively unknown region so far as the world is concerned.
Electrical engineers, atomic scientists and the military will be making this a mecca.”
Samuel Lovejoy was an 8-year-old schoolboy at the time. Three Mile Island was a central Pennsylvania farmland unheard of in other parts of the country. Thomas Wilson was preparing to graduate from Amherst College and return to Maryland for dental school.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was the Atomic Energy Commission. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was proclaiming, “The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here — now — today.”
In a 1953 speech before the United Nations General Assembly, he called for a mobilization “to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.” The nation’s attitude toward atomic energy in the mid-50s — when technological advances were seen as a weapon in the Cold War rather than the war against energy shortages — was recorded in the national media, where stories examined: “From Utopia to Reality,” “Conquest of the Atom,” “Freedom for the Atom,” “Atomic Future.” The enthusiasm is also reflected in the pace of the Yankee project, which moved at lightning speed compared with today’s slow, regulated procedural pace.
The project was first announced in March 1955, and Yankee’s application for a construction permit was granted by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957. Construction began in March 1958 and was completed by June 1960.
Today, the licensing and construction process may take as long as 14 years.
The “peaceful atom,” as it was referred to in those days — to differentiate it from the atomic bomb which had been introduced a decade earlier had already been tested in numerous experimental government reactors.
Yankee — launched by 10 New England utilities the day after Eisenhower signed the amended Atomic Energy Act permitting private ownership of atomic facilities — became New England’s first commercial nuclear generating plant. And the reception to what was described by the company as “Yankee ingenuity” was enthusiastic.
“Everything was sweetness and light,” recalls Yankee President James E. Tribble, who came to the corporation in 1961 from Texas Instruments. “Nuclear power was new and exciting to everyone. We had speakers who were in demand to talk to service groups. They never heard a negative comment. There was a tremendous push to develop a peaceful use for the atom.”
Originally planned to incorporate a 485-megawatt reactor and a 145-megawatt generator, the plant was licensed for a 392-megawatt reactor and 120 megawatts of electricity and was eventually upgraded to a 600-megawatt reactor that would generate a net 175 megawatts of electricity.
The federal government was so anxious to have a demonstration project to show that the “friendly atom” could be harnessed that it subsidize the project with $8.8 million and paid for the first five years of fuel.
Part of the design for the plant — which cost less than $40 million to build — came from numerous government-built Jest reactors.
At Shippingport, Pa., Duquesne Light Power Co. and the Atomic Energy Commission cooperated on a project in which the federal government operated a reactor and }he steam was sold to the utility for generation of 60 megawatts of electricity.
Although Yankee, which was to be entirely privately operated, is the oldest operating commercial nuclear facility in the nation, it was not the first. Dresden 1, a 207-megawatt boiling water reactor plant at Morris, Ill., began commercial operation four months before Yankee. But it has been shut down ‘Since 1978 for systems upgrades.
Still, Yankee drew attention around the world, and scientists and dignitaries visited the small town to study the design of the plant to adapt it for use elsewhere.
Since the dawn of the atomic energy age in Rowe, nuclear plants that dwarf their predecessor have sprouted across the nation, many of them generating more than 1,000 megawatts each. There are 74 operating commercial reactors in the United States; seven of them in New England.
But if the nation — in the years immediately after construction of Yankee — came to take nuclear energy for granted, that complacency didn’t last long.
“Man, has it changed,” said Yankee President Tribble.
“Over the past 20 years, it’s changed from day to night.”
— RICHIE DAVIS