Talk:Experimental Breeder Reactor I

Meltdown
Here, I found this on the internet...

The U.S. experience with "fast breeder" reactors argues against restarting the Fast Flux Test Facility. In November 1955, the first U.S. "power reactor" ever to produce electricity, the EBR-1, (experimental breeder reactor) melted down during testing. Rather than scramming the reactor, the operator mistakenly hit the button for slow shut down, and in the few seconds it took to press the correct button, approximately half of the reactor core melted down. The public was not made aware of this meltdown until Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the man who claimed nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter," was confronted by the Wall Street Journal and had to admit his ignorance of the accident.


 * Cut the from the page and redirected. Mark Richards 00:08, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Merge
Note: I do not believe it is appropriate to merge this with EBR II. The two were in different locations, run by different organizations, and ran for different periods. Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 18:20, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with not merging. Calling twe two unrelated however is the other extreme. I propose to delete "unrelated" as you make enough distance, so to speak, with just stating:
 * "There is also a separate facility called Experimental Breeder Reactor II."

Pukkie (talk) 12:07, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

to cheap to meter

 * re: "Too cheap to meter:" IAnyone in the power industry should have understood that there are huge costs associated with the production and distribution of power, even if the heat source to create the steam were free. No one gives away switchyard, transmission system, aux power, operators, maintenance force, unit transformers, boilers, or turbines free. Edison (talk) 05:02, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

First reactor
EBR-1 was the first reactor to generate power. Is it worth mentioning the first actual nuclear power plants? The first was, I believe, Obninsk. DonPMitchell (talk) 02:34, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

"Atomic energy was successfully harvested for the first time"--wasn't there actually a tiny generator at Oak Ridge immediately after the war? I'm not the expert to edit the main page, but I think the museum there shows the first electricity-generating apparatus.

Disputed
Nuclear power plant contains this: "Electricity was generated by a nuclear reactor for the first time ever on September 3, 1948 at the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the United States, and was the first nuclear power station to power a light bulb."

I don't think this article should contain the claim it does, and I am marking it as dubious on that basis. --John (talk) 23:27, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

No, indeed, X-10 did not generate electricity
A confusion might be arising here from the fact that the English word power is overly polysemic. X-10 generated a lot of thermal power indeed (up to 500 kW it seems), but I cannot find any indication that this heat was ever used to generate electricity. The goal here was to synthetize plutonium as a fission product, and heat was, in this instance, an undesirable by-product that had to be evacuated.

After thoughtfull consideration and carefull reviewing of internal links and external sources, I hereby take the decision to remove any reference to X-10 as producing electrical power.

On a side note, I don't suppose that it is reasonable at all to cite flicker.com as a source.

Noliscient (talk) 13:53, 20 December 2021 (UTC)


 * It appears the X-10 indeed ran an experiment that used thermal heat from the reactor to generate electricity. This youtube video shows diagrams of the experiment and a plaque at the X-10 site commemorating the event. I updated the EBR-I article to clarify the conflict. Ajnosek (talk) 16:25, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Design
I was somewhat appalled to find no mention of the fuel or coolant. These are important parts of the historical significance of EBR-I (and what I was looking for when I came here... it was an LMFBR but neither sodium cooled nor oxide fueled as I now discover, while EBR-II went to sodium cooling but retained the metallic fuel). I've made a tiny but referenced start to a section on its design. Andrewa (talk) 15:52, 27 October 2019 (UTC)