Nuclear Power

After scientists at the end of the 19th century began exploring the composition of matter, it didn't take them long to realize the enormous energy contained within atoms—as summed up in Albert Einstein's equation E = mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). Early on, scientists speculated that the release of such energy could result in the most powerful explosions ever created. They also predicted that, if controlled, the released energy could be used to power vehicles or make electricity. In 1904, for example, British chemist Frederick Soddy declared that a ship could make a round-trip voyage from England to Australia fueled by the energy in a pint of uranium. As nuclear energy production continues to be controversial and to appear regularly in the news media, this entry is designed to provide some of the context and background needed to understand the current status of this endeavor.

The first significant use of nuclear energy came in the form of the atomic bombs the United States tested in July 1945 and dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month as World War II came to [Page 519]an end. Those latter two bombs, one created by splitting the atoms of uranium and the other those of plutonium, killed an estimated 210,000 people immediately and in the short term. While the uranium was produced by a process called enrichment, which will be discussed in further sections, the plutonium was created as a byproduct of the operation of uranium-fueled nuclear reactors and was then separated from other residual products and manufactured into bombs. After World War II, nuclear reactors were used for many years only for plutonium bomb production as the nuclear arms race developed between the United States and the Soviet Union and then their allies.

Scientists soon figured out how the uranium-fueled reactors could produce electricity as well as bomb material, so they created dual-use reactors. The Soviets introduced a small dual-use reactor in 1954, and the British put their first dual-use reactor online in 1956 to produce plutonium and generate electricity for public use. The next year at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the United States began operating the world's first nuclear power plant dedicated to electricity production. This reactor was a larger version of a reactor design employed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation to build nuclear-powered submarines, the first of which—the Nautilus—was launched by the U.S. Navy in 1955.