Blog Archives

Nuclear plant abandoned On this day in 1964, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announces it will abandon plans to build a nuclear power plant at Bodega Head, on the Pacific Coast 50 miles north of San Francisco. The natural beauty of the location, combined with the fact that it is located directly atop the seismically active San Andreas fault line, were major points against the project. Undeterred, PG&E began the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on the same fault line a few years later.

First nuclear electricity is produced on this day at the Experimental Breeder Reactor in Arco, Idaho on this day in 1951.

Karen Silkwood born this day in 1946. Silkwood was an anti-nuclear activist who worked at a Kerr-McGee plant nuclear facility near Crescent, Oklahoma. Silkwook and the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union she worked with alleged that Kerr-McGee “tmanufactured faulty fuel rods, falsified product inspection records, and risked employee safety.” She was killed in her car on the way to a meeting with a New York Times reporter.

Nuclear Bombs for Peace On this day in 1958, the US Atomic Energy Commission asks to US Bureau of Land Management to set aside over one million acres of Alaska’s Ogotoruk Valley in order to test what Edward Teller called “the great art of geographic engineering, to reshape the earth to your pleasure.” A series of nuclear detonations would create a harbor at the site, about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle at Cape Thompson on the Alaskan coast. The idea was part of Operation Plowshare. Also see Douglas L. Vandegraft’s Project Chariot site. Both Chariot and the larger Plowshare were called off due to concerns about radiation contamination over larger areas.

Nuclear cleanup soaks up budget The cleaning and maintenance of nuclear weapons facilities consumes two thirds of fyunding for the Department of Energy, a Carnegie Endowment report says on this day in 2009.

Energy independence is new US president Gerald R. Ford’s goal in his first State of the Union message on this day in 1975. Ford outlined plans to to reduce foreign oil imports, which included tax breaks for the coal and nuclear industries, higher energy taxes, improvements in energy conservation, and reductions in energy demand.

takes place this day in 1979 when a partial meltdown occurs in one of the reactors in the nuclear utility complex. Operators narrowly avoid a much worse accident by correctly guessing that they need to vent explosive hydrogen gasses building up in the core. The accident is one of three major events that have halted world nuclear reactor construction, the other two being the Chernobyl disaster of April 26, 1986 and the Fukushima disaster of March 11, 2011.

US denies Soviet nuclear dumping accusations The United States denied accusations that it was dumping nuclear waste in the ocean in violation of international treaties on this day in 1962. However, the US did confirm that it was dumping radioactive waste in the ocean.

Savannah River nuclear bomb production complex begins on this day in 1950 with announcements by the Atomic Energy Commission and the E.I. DuPont Co. Small towns in South Carolina along the Savannah River are bought out and residents moved away as the bomb factories are built in the 1950s. The SRP subsequently becomes one of the most toxic and dangerous places on earth, where millions of gallons of plutonium nitrate are stored in leaking containers. The challenge in the face of climate change is to stabilize and move the plutonium so that it will not be on the shoreline or underwater.

Explosion at SL-1 nuclear reactor on this day in 1961 in Idaho Falls. The Atomic Energy Commission research reactor blew up after an operator pulled a control rod out of the reactor, triggering an out-of-control power surge, partial meltdown, and an explosive release of radioactive steam. One of three workers killed is impaled on a control rod, and all three are so heavily contaminated that they are buried in lead coffins. When nuclear power advocates say that no one has ever died from nuclear power in the US, this is the accident they are overlooking.